.aesthetic talk
Patricia Vernhes
The Phenomena of Keepin’ On
written Colter Ruland
Patricia Vernhes has gone by many other names. She was professionally known as Pati Yang and formed the bands Children, Flykkiller, and Patti Yang Group. Her Polish birth name is Patrycja Grzymałkiewicz. Her name, like her life and work, is constantly changing and reforming.
Vernhes’s past lives are manifold. She grew up under martial law in Poland, touring with her punk rock stepfather, Jan Borysewicz of the band Lady Pank, as the country transitioned from communism to democracy; she emigrated to London, lying about her age in order to study at university, only to have her visa denied while she bartended during the night to go to class in the morning; she started several experimental bands and released her debut album, Jaszczurka, in 1998 with Sony Records; she moved to the United States by way of New York, where she began some of her first paintings, before finally settling in the desert near Joshua Tree, California.
“Once I stepped out of the car for the first time, I knew I needed to live here. There is ether around, waiting to be filled with ideas, creations, manifested thoughts and wants. It's like living on a blank canvas.”
Patricia Vernhes speaks with Colter Ruland
LE MILE Magazine HEROES, Nr. 32
Vernhes’s interdisciplinary artistic practice is the convergence of these many past and present lives, incorporating elements of sound installation, sculptures, found objects, and abstract painting. No matter the type—she rightly disputes any concrete “classification” of herself or her work—the vein running through her story is the desert in which she currently lives with her new name, creating what she calls a “dialogue with the other side.”
Vernhes lives on a plot of land near the 70,000 acres of wilderness at Black Lava Butte, a part of the Sand to Snow National Monument. This environment, too, is a convergence of multiple ecosystems. This is an area where several deserts exchange boundaries, where chaparral and woodlands are found to the west, the San Bernardino Mountains beyond.
When she came to the desert, Vernhes was struck by the immense quiet: “I consider silence one of the rarest luxuries of the modern world. Once I stepped out of the car for the first time, I knew I needed to live here. There is ether around, waiting to be filled with ideas, creations, manifested thoughts and wants. It's like living on a blank canvas.”
Within the silence that the desert provides, Vernhes founded a studio where she creates sculptural work in an ongoing series called Other One and an experimental audio project called Noirmoutier with her husband Nicolas Vernhes, a music producer, mixer and engineer. The objects Vernhes creates are often encased in plaster and epoxy, an act of simultaneous exaltation and deconstruction. Noirmoutier adds a performance element to her work that, in her words, acts like a “blood pulse in the veins of an image.”
The two utilize a variety of instruments, including a set of 20 binaurally tuned quartz bowls, synthesizers and analog tape delays, to create auditory experiences inspired by the laws of sound, hallucinatory resonance, and sound therapy.
Noirmoutier creates soundscapes that remove referential frameworks and clear structures so listeners can sit with themselves, reminiscent of how animals might perceive, understand, and interpret sound. Their aim is to convey a nonverbal narrative inspired by the stillness of the desert. The same is true of Vernhes’s sculptural work: the structures of objects and how we might expect to interpret them are realigned, pulled out, or hidden altogether. By recasting an object, Vernhes both destroys the original and elevates it as a work of art.
“I can never put an object back where I took it from in exactly the same way. That place will never be the same as it was before I picked it up. It’s a renewal in the sense of giving a new meaning to an object and transferring it, with that new mission, elsewhere.”
Patricia Vernhes speaks with Colter Ruland
LE MILE Magazine HEROES, Nr. 32
While her work can operate separately—here one might point out her sculpture, over there her music—they are meant to work together. This cooperation extends to the environments these objects and sounds reside in.
“I paint with light and shadow and everything that surrounds me.” Vernhes frequently installs her painting and sculptural work in the surrounding hills. Their placement outside in the desert is documented like one might document a rare ritual.
The experience of Vernhes’s work, especially alongside Noirmoutier’s live performances, recalls our oldest stories and the oral traditions they come from—how many of them do not have singular, identifiable authors and are therefore rendered genderless and fluid. Her work, like the oral tradition, is not cemented in written language. Like these stories, often centered on heroes who are emblematic of entire societies or ways of being, Vernhes’s work, rooted in the personal, is emblematic of the universal nature of things: the planet, memory, and existence.
Vernhes cherry-picks elements of larger, unseen dramas.
A camera Vernhes’s grandfather gave to her mother, now covered in plaster, encloses the memories of her familial life in Poland. This sculptural camera, called Les Premiers Pas, recorded Vernhes’s first steps as a child. One only needs to peer a little deeper to see the larger backdrop of growing up during that time.
“One of my earliest memories,” says Vernhes, “is watching the army and tanks outside of our house. Sometimes I see this memory from above, as if I took myself out of it and witnessed it as a ghost. Sometimes I see it abstractly: brutalist architecture, vandalised staircases, rationed food, empty stores, censored art and music that led to a vibrant underground culture, propaganda, double standards in education when we secretly learned at home the ‘other’ history that we weren’t allowed to disclose outside our homes in order to keep our families safe. This phenomena of keepin’ on as if all was OK, as if joy and love were our birthright no one could take away—it was full of polarities.”
It is this phenomena, wild and protean, that Vernhes wrangles and concentrates into her objects. She transmutes the past into profound meditations on purpose and renewal.
A decade ago, Vernhes’s intestines twisted and she nearly died. Her internal scarring, the result of the traumatic handling of her organs in an emergency procedure, formed adhesions. Vernhes, who recently underwent another surgery to address this past trauma, speaks of this time in relation to her own work, of removing and handling objects that form new bonds, adhesions, with worlds they may not be familiar with. A chess board is repainted in order to void its own rules; a large piece of natural driftwood is artificially sealed in white plaster; two lava stones are placed together to form a pair of organs during the pandemic in 2020, when we were only beginning to learn how COVID-19 affects the lungs.
The organic and the humanmade become interchangeable, handled with care even if they are forever altered. Like Vernhes’s own body, these objects are reformed to find new purpose. “I can never put an object back where I took it from in exactly the same way. That place will never be the same as it was before I picked it up. It’s a renewal in the sense of giving a new meaning to an object and transferring it, with that new mission, elsewhere.”
Once Vernhes takes an object from its natural state or recast from its original intent, it is an action that has the potential to reverberate throughout time. A river rock, taken from a dry lake bed in Johnson Valley near Landers in the Mojave Desert, might never have been touched by human hands until Vernhes came across it. A Japanese pachinko machine from the 1950s, found in a swap meet, can no longer function properly and dispense euphoria in the same way it was intended.
What kinds of lives do inanimate objects have outside the moments we are aware they exist? Can these things live independently of our involvement?
There is something inherently tense, grand, foreboding, tragic, perhaps comforting about using an object such as a pachinko machine or a river rock as a microcosm for existence. “The rocks are laughing at us,” recalls Vernhes, when she installed several works amongst the harsh shadows of boulders overlooking the desert. One’s existence, like the many lives Vernhes has lived, suddenly becomes so small when placed within a landscape that is millions of years old. So much of Vernhes’s work is about decentering our perceived importance.
There is an elegiac quality to these objects that are irrevocably changed. While they indeed remind us of our own mortality and uselessness, they also remind us that our utility is not codified. All things are able to undergo transformation, and because something has always behaved in one way, it doesn’t mean it cannot be changed. The memories trapped in Vernhes’s camera can simultaneously be about life under martial law or her first steps as a child. The river rock can be mourned for its removal from the desert or it can be lifted from its humble origins onto a pedestal as a remarkable work of art. Vernhes helps us escape from the labels we inflict upon each other and ourselves.
“I am thrilled to send my sculptures into the world so they can change whatever environments they end up in.” Perhaps the rocks, and any other objects Vernhes sends from her small studio in the desert, will carry their laughter with them.
follow artist @patriciacvernhes