BEING ARTSEA
Tripoli Gallery is located at 26 Ardsley Rd, Wainscott, NY 11975. visit www.tripoligallery.com @tripoligallery
“I give the main exhibition space to an artist to us it as their studio; to let viewers have a glimpse into the practice but still acting as a medium between, maintaining the sacredness of the artist.”
Installation view, Arrival: November 26, 2021–February 27, 2022. L to R: Connie Fox, Nour Mobarak, Hiroyuki Hamada, Keith Sonnier, and Dan McCarthy. Photo by Chloe Giffkins, courtesy of Tripoli Gallery, ©Tripoli Gallery Inc., 2022.
Tripoli Patterson styled by Leonard Frisbie located at 78 Main St #7, Sag Harbor, NY 11963. Photography by @2madison_fender.
The result was the Alone Gallery, a series of four spotlight exhibitions lasting ten days in August of 2020. Visitors booked appointments online and received text messages giving them a keycode to enter the gallery, where they were allowed to experience the space by themselves in 30-minute windows, after which Patterson and his crew would return to sanitize touched surfaces for the next guests. “You think of all the mental traumas people have been dealing with during the pandemic, and art is such a fulfilling thing for our minds and our sanities— giving them a sense of comfort. Even though there weren’t people, art has a presence of people.” Along with his love of art, Tripoli inherited an affinity for surfing from his mother at a tender age. “I was eight, and I couldn’t swim. So I remember some early surf
sessions, when I fell off my board, just quickly grabbing my leash because I wasn’t a good swimmer. I kind of learned how to swim after learning how to surf. If you put yourself in those scenarios, the survival instinct is pretty good. I feel like that’s taught me how to do everything— I do it all backwards.” A champion by his teens, Patterson surfed all over the world, including Bali, New Zealand, and Oahu, where he enjoyed the hospitality of surf legend Rory Parker. But after a period of self-reflection, Tripoli decided to leave the competitive surfing circuit and direct his energy to providing a platform for artists. Upcoming plans include an exhibition of the works of Connie Fox and Robert Dash as well as an artist in residence program, where Tripoli will continue to create a portal for artists to transport and connect us across time and space.
histories or a recording of our brothers’ and sisters’ presence on the earth— these objects that are sacred and related to a portal or a craft connecting this world to a previous world or a future world,” he says. “I think when an artist is creating a work where they’re really lost in time, they have this – I keep on saying magic—but they have this kind of unknown thing they give to the piece. And then they continue on their journey, but they really leave a piece of themselves with that object they created from that kind of sacred space.” This sense of connection translates into his exhibitions, which aren’t bound by time, medium, or genre. “I give the main exhibition space to an artist to use as their studio; to let viewers have a glimpse into the practice but still acting as a medium between, maintaining the sacredness of the artist.” His most
recent Thanksgiving Collective show, “Arrivals,” featured a diverse spectrum of art including abstracted 1970s landscapes from Connie Fox, neon pieces from the late Keith Sonnier, witty animal portraits from Miles Partington, and emotionally evocative new paintings from Lauren West. Patterson explains: “It’s so great to have the artists around where we can talk to them and see what they were thinking. But a lot of times they’re not going to be present, and you have to just use the information they left us. Sometimes a painting can depict something that a language maybe can’t write.” This was certainly true when a mere six months after moving the gallery to Wainscott in November 2019, Patterson had to find an alternate way to fulfill his mission in the pandemic-shuttered world. Not only the artists, but their viewers could not be present.
74 • AFLOAT USA Hamptons May/June 2022
AFLOAT USA Hamptons May/June 2022 • 75
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