Meet the Artist
Patrick
Stochmal
Sculpture/Installation
“Coming from places of intimate encounters that are hidden (laying beneath dirt and logs, caressing the underbellies of upturned leaves, gleaming forth from detritus that does not belong) our queer ecologies proliferate, but not as linear and coherent reproductive intensities that can be traced from one contained body to another. Residing between the boundaries of procreation and annihilation, our tender embraces of mutual contamination pose the loving risk of becoming so fervently intoxicated by one another that we destroy our prescribed ways of being in our togetherness (the risk of touching oneself through the insides of another). Our interspecies intercourses elide heteronormative body logics and anthropocentric paradigms, our genealogies proliferate in precarious and indeterminate spaces of queer negation that seep through the cordoned coordinates of the properly natural. Our coupling does not signify the inertial stasis of a normative coupling, but is instead a coupling that is always more than two (secretly infecting bodies, an ever-expanding corporeal tumescence). These shared moments are perhaps at best always living and ever-dying echoes of elusive encounters that sediment as conditions of being - a destruction of sanctified lifeways that is the proliferation of emergent contiguities through which we coalesce and individuate (we endlessly discover new modes of learning to love one another, to care for each other, to be together).”
Patrick Stochmal (b. 2001) is an interdisciplinary artist based in T'karonto (Toronto), Ontario working primarily through sculpture and performance to explore the intersections of ontology, queerness, and ecology. Employing open-ended processes of material contamination and deterioration, his work takes the form of collaborative engagements with non-human entities to consider expanded notions of kinship and the politics of embodiment. Seeking to disrupt human-centric perspectives of the world, he stages leaky encounters between the natural and synthetic and the human and non-human to investigate moments of their categorical coalescence and structural indeterminacy.
OCAD U - Faculty of Art
Integrated Media
Minor Completed, 2024
Sculpture Bio-Art Smelling things Plastics fabrication Installation