Stand C10
19th – 23rd October 2022
For Paris+ Seventeen presents a new body of work by Patrick Goddard comprised of a 20 minute surreal comedy Whoopsie’s Dream together with four wall-based sculptures.
The film, building on Goddard’s Animal Antics, again features as antagonist the talking dog Whoopsie. This time as she narrates her recent nightmare to the viewer. As in the previous film, this Bichon frise lap dog reveals herself to be somewhat right wing and xenophobic as her dream reflects her anxieties and prejudices around immigration, queer liberation and the Other.
Satirising and literalising racist linguistic tropes that compare the immigrant to the animal (think of swarms, infestations and plagues in the press), the film sees ‘wild’ animals invade the dog’s town, home, and body. Untamed creatures, as opposed to the pedigree dog, serve both as a paradigm for anthropogenic concerns but also as a metaphor for a more human racial politics. Invertebrates overrun the home, parasites infest the body and a host of giant snails blight the suburban environment. “Criminals and deviants come to consume the English garden, to consume the entire world and leave nought but primordial slime in their wake.” The narrative ultimately comes to serve as a comedic criticism of Brexit and the ideology that spawned it.
Two other themes are dominant in the narrative. The entire film plays with the idea of scale, with the miniature used as metaphor for controllability, the domestic, the safe, the pacified, the controllable, the comprehensible. Conversely the gigantic is cypher for the untamed, the unknown and the other. The film features a large model railway set in and fetishising 1960’s England. Another theme that saturates the narrative is sexual anxiety and concerns about procreation, a return of the repressed queer and fears around both one’s own infertility and the potency of the Other.
The four other components in the presentation, thematically derived from the film, are wall-based sculpture-paintings consisting of model-train style dioramas. Styled as nostalgic visions of 1960’s England, as in the later section of the film, these miniature models are overrun by snails. The shelled molluscs serving as both a cypher for a returning untamed natural world as well as parodying racist concerns over immigration. The four models – a church scene, a high-street of shops, a row of houses and a small regional train station – all sit as shelves beneath large abstracted skyscape painting on canvas. The comparative largeness of these skies further highlighting the miniature-ness of the models and implicitly the small mindedness of a conservative British nostalgia.
Excerpt from Patrick Goddard, Whoopsie’s Dream, 2022
Single channel 4k video with 5.1 sound
20 minutes
Premiered at Paris+ par Art Basel 2022
Still from Patrick Goddard, Whoopsie’s Dream, 2022
Single channel 4k video with 5.1 sound
20 minutes
Patrick Goddard, Funeral, 2022
Acrylic, aluminium, steel, resin, wood, fibre board, cardboard, snail shells, additive printing, acrylic paint, canvas
123 x 100 x 32 cm
Unique
Patrick Goddard, Funeral, 2022 (Detail)
Acrylic, aluminium, steel, resin, wood, fibre board, cardboard, snail shells, additive printing, acrylic paint, canvas
123 x 100 x 32 cm
Unique
Patrick Goddard, High Street, 2022 (Detail)
Acrylic, aluminium, steel, resin, wood, fibre board, cardboard, snail shells, additive printing, acrylic paint, canvas
123 x 100 x 32 cm
Unique
Patrick Goddard, High Street, 2022 (Detail)
Acrylic, aluminium, steel, resin, wood, fibre board, cardboard, snail shells, additive printing, acrylic paint, canvas
123 x 100 x 32 cm
Unique
Patrick Goddard, High Street, 2022
Acrylic, aluminium, steel, resin, wood, fibre board, cardboard, snail shells, additive printing, acrylic paint, canvas
123 x 100 x 32 cm
Unique
Installation view of Patrick Goddard solo project, Paris + par Art Basel, 2022.