A Frog into a Prince

Pat Cox is one of Valmonte’s amazing artists. Her home on La Selva Place, the hundredth built in Palos Verdes Estates, is filled with her intuitively skilled and constantly changing art work. Her chosen medium is “Assemblage” (you say it with a French accent). The art form is defined as ‘the putting together of disparate parts into a new whole using stuff from everyday life, both found and manufactured, fragmented or intact.’

To facilitate her craft she is a self-proclaimed ‘avid collector of junk’. Though some of her junk, mind you, are antiques and airplane propellers. “The materials I choose determine both its structure and its content. I look for things that fire me up and catch my attention.” Many of her pieces she considers unfinished because they still ‘speak’ to her. “My work explores the mystery and power of found objects through combination, alteration, juxtaposition and layering. The goal: transformation… the ordinary into the extraordinary, the frog into the prince.”

To accomplish these lofty goals she has had to become a painter, a welder and a carpenter. “I marry the materials.” The results are elegant, fluid and meaningful. Some contain love letters; others are built from space debris. A spindle becomes a vase, a bone relives as a bird, cotton and wire become the most intriguing of characters locked in a glass tube. Her home is a fascinating gallery of thoughts and feelings.

Pat started her artistic journey as a painter and over time, moved onward to collage. The process of collecting and rearranging paper to create an image evolved yet again - into the world of 3D - a sculptural form of collage. This practice of piecing together found objects for art’s sake was popular in the 1920’s and had notoriety in the 30’s. When it again took center stage in the 50’s the name Assemblage was coined and gallery goers know it is still alive and well today.

Many artists became quite famous for this type of work, Picasso being one of them. His exploration of found objects, along with the influence of Georges Braque, laid the ground-work for Cubism when these artists went back to painting. Joseph Cornell put his assembled worlds in boxes and is said to have been on the path to Surrealism. Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (the Dada Baroness) made Assemblage more famous than herself and she is suspected of being a source of inspiration behind “Ready Made” art – art made from manufactured and recognizable items like urinals and bicycle parts.

The ‘objets d'art’ that Pat Cox creates are more figurative in nature than Robert Rauschenberg’s, more narrative than Marcel Duchamp’s work and hold more mystery than Man Ray’s studio art. Each of her pieces invites you to find your place in it. Some enchanting and others bold; sliced submarine parts rearranged into a giant piece of jewelry appearing to hang weightless over a fireplace. Shrines of every size and topic seem to give homage to the mummified cougar lurking from a high shelf… or maybe it’s the Apollo 18 titanium Rorschach; each fantasy world is yours for the imagining and as fascinating as the next.

And, yes, they are for sale.

BuzzNet Tags: Valmonte Living Magazine ~ May Issue 2010,Palos Verdes Art Center,assemblage,Niki Chanel