PROJECTION 011 | Mitch Patrick & Ernesto Renda : Wayfinding

CHART is pleased to present Projection 011: Wayfinding, an exhibition of work by Mitch Patrick and Ernesto Renda. The opening reception will be held on Friday, April 11th, from 6–8 p.m., and the exhibition will remain on view through May 24th, 2025. Patrick and Renda share an interest in how digital technologies shape human vision and perception. Their individual works address the image saturated condition articulated with deep rooted, specific non-traditional materialities.

 Mitch Patrick utilizes a variety of analog and digital mediums, including drawing, photography, software, and 3D printing to make works that investigate what it might mean to slow down an image. Vernacular cell phone photography is fed into a software program and outputted into an image constituted of glyphs that make up an asemic alphabet of Patrick’s own design. He uses 3D printing in what he characterizes as “the least efficient way possible” to transform the glyph-image into a multi-part 3D printed image which is then assembled by sewing the individual parts together. Patrick’s chosen images – such as a cluttered computer workstation or a moth landing on his hand – feel familiar and somewhat nondescript, but carry a particular autobiographical significance for him. The resultant works are on the edge of dissolving into abstraction, yet Patrick grounds them in the tangible world with a small version of the original images embedded in the work along with an enlarged typographic key in the bottom corners of the work. Patrick is interested in the rapid fire rate in which we consume images, and attempts to question this by dissolving and re-constituting them into pixel-like units via his invented typographies. 

Ernesto Renda’s latest body of work is a series of reliefs that evoke topographic surfaces, root systems, and neural networks, which are made by layering and sculpting hot glue on wooden panels, and then applying flocking. Lines of acrylic paint suggest routes of various kinds – perhaps a regular train commute, an unplanned wander through a new neighborhood, or the flightpath of a bird. Renda has long been interested in maps, and how maps both represent and collapse space and time. They call to mind urban typologies and different kinds of human settlement; dense grids are reminiscent of a modern city and its complex transit system, while looser and more winding pathways are more akin to older medieval cities. The works allude to the machine perspective of satellite imagery, yet are fully compositions of his own mental conjuring. 

Through the creative misuse of utilitarian materials, Patrick and Renda explore the legibility of images, invented language systems, and embodied human perception. They probe at what it means to be a navigator and spectator of digital images, and operate as critically engaged cartographers of contemporary vision. 

Projection 011 is organized by Alex Feim.

About the Artists
Mitch Patrick (b. 1985) holds a BFA from the University of Montevallo and an MFA from Brooklyn College. He has participated in artist residencies in the U.S., Japan, and Portugal, and his work has been exhibited in New York at galleries including RAINRAIN and Picture Theory, as well as in a recent solo exhibition at Studio Kura in Itoshima, Japan. 

Ernesto Renda (b. 1995) holds a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BA in Modern Culture and Media Studies from Brown University. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include The Moment of Truth at Moskowitz Bayse (Los Angeles), Material Art Fair with Management, as well as group exhibitions at Turley Gallery (Hudson), Morgan Presents (New York), and Moskowitz Bayse. His work is in the permanent collection of Museo Jumex in Mexico City.

Both artists live and work in New York City.

About the Curator
Alex Feim is a researcher, writer, and independent curator based in Brooklyn. Her research and writing focuses on intersections between art and architecture, exhibition context and phenomenology, time based media, and experimental cartographic practice. Her writing has been published in Art Spiel, Battery Journal, and New York Review of Architecture, and she has curated exhibitions at Thomas VanDyke Gallery, Field of Play, and Morris Adjmi Architects. She received her BA in Art History and Comparative Literature from Binghamton University as well as her MA in Art History from Binghamton University.