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Patrick art of weird4/13/2023 ![]() As your eyes dare venture further down, there’s a pair of ears with a knife protruding through them, humans gathering for shelter, and all manner of strange beasts consuming humans. At the top, we see a shadowy city of sorts, illuminated by the fires springing up around it. Most depictions of the fiery depths are quite tame compared to Bosch’s painting. Then, on the right panel, all hell breaks loose – quite literally. 1480-1505, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Hieronymous Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (right panel), c. Down on the earthly side, we see humans engaging in all kinds of behavior in a variety of odd places two figures are laid up inside a clam, two more are face to face standing on their heads, or just chilling in an oddly egg-like object. In the air, you’ll find tree-bearing humans sailing through the air atop a swan-lion hybrid. ![]() As you take it all in, you’ll also probably wonder what Bosch ate to conjure such surrealistic images. The left and central panels utilize a common horizon line that carries your eyes through Eden. As your eyes move about, you’ll probably conclude Bosch has created an image of a human menagerie. When the outer panels unfold, they reveal three brightly colored panels depicting a common theme: sin. ![]() Hieronymous Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (outer panels), c.1480-1505, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain. God is perched in the top right corner as he observes his handy-work. The half-empty sphere illustrates the formation of Eden as the waters of the world seem to drain and separate. The story begins on the outer panels where Bosch created a monochromatic image of the Third Day of the Creation of the World. From outer panels to inside panels, it visualizes the Biblical creation and humanity’s fate, inflicted by our own tragic flaws. How can we not begin this list with Hieronymus Bosch’s famously bizarre triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights? The infamous masterpiece was likely commissioned by Engelbert, Count of Nassau, for the Coudenberg Palace. Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, c.1480-1505, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Today, we’re going to dive, headfirst, into that box! So, strap in as we take a look at the top 10 strange paintings. It’s almost like being the weird kid in middle school you get put in your “box” and people peek in but don’t ask too many questions – that is if they dare to get close. We usually gloss over the oddities, because, well, they’re just weird. In addition to his work as an artist, Patrick currently acts as the artistic director to the Auschwitz Study Foundation, a freelance creative director, and is an intermittent guest curator of the nomadic Jan Weenix Gallery.For every picturesque painting, there is at least one strange and bizarre counterpart. Patrick received a BFA in Sculpture from CSU Long Beach in 2011, and an MFA in Art from California Institue of the Arts in 2014. Throughout his works, Patrick experiments with themes of immersion, the ethics of materiality in fantasy, how the interface shapes our mythosphere, psychosphere, and cognisphere, and the role of the individual in collective storytelling. These orchestrated events have taken the form of an interactive, immersive theatrical escape room ( Return to FOREVERHOUSE), a set of experimental stand-up comedy ( I SO SORE FOR EVER THING), a 2-minute micro-opera performed every-hour-on-the-hour inside of a public sculpture mounted to the front of the historic Gamble House in Pasadena ( The Swirling Mess Below the Sleeping Porch…), a set of unsual pedagogical gifts as an invitation to participate in a life-long collaboration ( Weird Alms) and most recently, an ongoing, collaborative paratheatrical ritual-game that revolves around an ever growing pantheon of props 12 years in the making (Fool’s Window). Participants are invited to wander into the Interworveled, past the edges of orientation, through the active transmutation and shifting scale of the “event”. His works are conceived as enactments of Azguyenquynan!-phantasmagorical LARPing events where suddenly immersive over-states fade at the edges of the forming worlds abound as tiny anthropomorphic ducks transform from hand puppets to miniature timegods, T-shirts become spirits that graft the taste of the audience into wakes for dead drawings, historic monuments become cukoo-clocks that birth giant, beaked chorales, and a crack in the wall speaks green light to quell the violence implicit in the misplacement of puzzle pieces. His most recent works incite opportunities for autopoetic game-setting and rule-making around absurdist narrativized rituals where objects can be explored and haunted by different communities and creative practitioners. Patrick Michael Ballard is a Los Angeles based artist and fool-magician that primarily orchestrates secrets and surprises in immersive theater and interactive sculpture games.
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