Bio
Patrick Michael Ballard is a Los Angeles based artist and fool-magician that primarily orchestrates secrets and surprises in immersive theater and interactive sculpture games. His most recent works incite opportunities for autopoetic game-setting and rule-making around absurdist narrativized rituals where objects can be explored and haunted by different communities and creative practitioners. His works are conceived as enactments of Azguyenquynan!—phantasmagorical LARPing events where suddenly immersive over-states fade at the edges of the forming worlds abound as tiny anthropomorphic ducks transform from hand puppets to miniature timegods, T-shirts become spirits that graft the taste of the audience into wakes for dead drawings, historic monuments become cukoo-clocks that birth giant, beaked chorales, and a crack in the wall speaks green light to quell the violence implicit in the misplacement of puzzle pieces. Participants are invited to wander into the Interworveled, past the edges of orientation, through the active transmutation and shifting scale of the “event”.
These orchestrated events have taken the form of an interactive, immersive theatrical escape room (Return to FOREVERHOUSE), a set of experimental stand-up comedy (I SO SORE FOR EVER THING), a 2-minute micro-opera performed every-hour-on-the-hour inside of a public sculpture mounted to the front of the historic Gamble House in Pasadena (The Swirling Mess Below the Sleeping Porch…), a set of unsual pedagogical gifts as an invitation to participate in a life-long collaboration (Weird Alms) and most recently, an ongoing, collaborative paratheatrical ritual-game that revolves around an ever growing pantheon of props 12 years in the making (Fool’s Window). Throughout his works, Patrick experiments with themes of immersion, the ethics of materiality in fantasy, how the interface shapes our mythosphere, psychosphere, and cognisphere, and the role of the individual in collective storytelling. Patrick received a BFA in Sculpture from CSU Long Beach in 2011, and an MFA in Art from California Institue of the Arts in 2014. In addition to his work as an artist, Patrick currently acts as the artistic director to the Auschwitz Study Foundation, a freelance creative director, and is an intermittent guest curator of the nomadic Jan Weenix Gallery.
