DAME KIND - Photographs from Patrick Farris with Lané Pittard

DAME KIND reflects on nature as a vehicle for meaning, joy, and reverence. The works are inspired by deep encounters with place, the simple home garden, and an essay about mystical experience.

In the introduction to the 1963 anthology The Protestant Mystics, W.H. Auden presents the “vision of Dame Kind” as an “overwhelming conviction” that the natural world is significant and that “the existence of everything […] is holy.” Auden suggests that this vision leads to “innocent joy” and reverence, where distinctions “vanish” and the viewer desires nothing but “communion” with the world, and the “wonder,” and “splendor of creation.”

Using photographs and sounds from the artist’s garden, and the area surrounding his home, Patrick Farris aims to communicate a similar experience of ecstaticism and majesty from familiar places. Pairing these works with his poetry and additional photographs from the artist Lané Pittard, DAME KIND hopes to reveal the splendid in the ordinary.