Exploring the pathos and promise of the human experience, New Mexico artist Patrick Mehaffy creates sculptures, drawings, and, more recently, paintings that harken back to the timelessness of cultures past while affirming human relevance in a precarious world. Beneath the sensual surfaces of his works lies a keen understanding of the liminal spaces between nature and society and the impact of human activity on Earth, now known as the Anthropocene.
Throughout his thirty-five-year career, Mehaffy has approached his art from the perspective of the unconscious. His work is informed by his education and training in anthropology and museology as well as his experiences in the wilderness and, ultimately, as an artist. He reveres animals while admiring how past cultures have done the same through their art and objects of veneration. Mehaffy's reveries are aesthetically perceptive and keep the past alive while interpreting it in new ways, reigniting our own need to appreciate and honor nature and culture, both past and present.
--from the essay "Beneath the Surface: The Work of Patrick Mehaffy" byJulie Sasse, Chief Curator of the Tucson Museum of Art
