Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago, IL
Frieze, Los Angeles  February 26-March 1, 2026
Solo Exhibition: Artist, Ebony G. Patterson

by Cathy Breslaw

March 9, 2026

Jamaican-born artist Ebony G. Patterson works across tapestry, drawing, photography, and installation to create immersive environments centered on the familiar idea of the garden. Using a profusion of decorative and ornamental materials – often ordinary or discarded, she draws viewers in, encouraging them to look closely.  Beneath this lush and colorful surface, Patterson reveals and confronts complex issues of race, class, gender, and post-colonial identity.

Patterson’s installation at the Frieze Art Fair features three major works. The walls of the Monique Meloche Gallery booth are covered in a repeating photographic pattern of printed fabric, forming a wallpaper of dense flora and fauna. This decorative environment pulls the viewer inward toward the large central work, in the swallowing…she carries the whole…the hole.

To create this monumental diptych tapestry, Patterson arranged a photo shoot with costumes and dramatic sets and sent the digital file to a commercial weaver to produce the jacquard tapestries. She then cut and embellished, including cascading strands of pearls and beads that spill to the floor, artificial flowers, butterflies, birds, snakes, collaged and painted branches of leaves, glitter, drapery/upholstery tassels, and fragmented human forms. Through these richly layered surfaces, Patterson uses beauty as an invitation – drawing viewers into a deeper conversation about visibility, vulnerability, and the social forces shaping identity.

The second major work, a white-framed diptych titled …kiss goodbye…goodbye kiss.., consisting of two organically shaped sculptural collages which include a dense mix of brightly colored plant forms – both blooming and decaying – interwoven with insects, seashells, and fragmented snakes. From the bottom of each panel, dark skinned forearms and hands extend downward.  One panel bears  the word kiss and the other goodbye. Rich in texture and detail, the work encourages viewers to reflect on themes of connection, separation and transformation.

The third major work includes three white-framed panels titled Studies for a Vocabulary of Loss. These sculptural pieces combine digital prints on archival watercolor and construction paper and assemblages of feathered butterflies, plastic flies, roaches and memorial rosettes.  Each work is marked with a single word – perdition, catastrophe, and forgetting. In these pieces, Patterson’s message becomes more direct evoking themes of loss, destruction and the fragility of memory.

To create her work, Patterson shreds, tears, and cuts materials by hand, a process that mirrors the life cycle of a garden – plants beginning as seedlings, blooming, and eventually dying. By then sewing and gluing the materials back together, Patterson transforms them with a message of how marginalized lives are often seen or overlooked.

In Patterson’s hands, the garden becomes both a place of beauty and a place of reckoning, where lush surfaces reveal deeper stories about loss and identity giving viewers points of reflection.