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Austin J. Pratt was conceived at Alcatraz on Valentine’s Day 1987 and raised in Reno in the high desert mountains of Northern Nevada. There he fronted the post-punk outfit Spitting Image, served on the gallery committee of the arts non-profit The Holland Project, and worked as a Public Art Conservator and Gallery Manager for the City of Reno.

Pratt received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Nevada, Reno in 2015. He is currently an MFA candidate in Painting + Drawing (2018) at the University of Tennessee, and serves as the Assistant Director of Gallery 1010 in downtown Knoxville.

"I get psyched about the space that occurs between multiple top-heavy connotations, wild, truly unruly associations, dissolving boundaries, inflating margins, and perforated edges. Areas where subject and object oscillate, vibrate, and hum."

"Using languages from sources such as cinema, poetry, and printmaking, I consider pattern recognition and degeneration, musicality, initiation, perception, legibility, and distance as generative and descriptive terms. Materials, images, text, patterns, marks, and color are staged within the boundaries, mise en scène, or ritual circle of the work. There I consider them as a structured like charged sigils, fetish objects, or talismans to reflect on auto-destructive white America, ecstasy, alienation, excess, vilification, veneration, the abject, the grotesque, New Age spirituality, violence, empathy, pop & counter-culture, etc."

- Austin J. Pratt, January 2017

* images courtesy of the artist