Giovanni’s Room is pleased to announce Patrick Carroll’s second exhibition with the gallery. “Writing “ opens on Friday, April 11 and runs through Saturday, May 17, 2025.

Exhibition Catalogue

Fruit of the Loom

By Mariella Rudi

“Hope? I have none and furthermore I condemn it with everything in my power. Hope is the flag, the special marker of hypocrisy... I don't believe in it. I believe only in my own vitality.”

- Pier Paolo Pasolini

"If you want to destroy my sweater // hold this thread as I walk away."

- Weezer

Giovanni’s Room has a ghost—it’s Leslie Jordan, the gay character actor-turned-TikTok icon who fatally crashed his Beamer next door three years ago. I don't write this to be funny, even if it still kind of is, but because it’s exactly the kind of joke without a punchline you’ll encounter with Patrick Carroll’s work. Sure, it’s part gallows humor (the old chestnut of grief+time=comedy), but mainly it’s a long-running visual or etymological gag Patrick has with himself that we’ve been invited to laugh at with him.

Ready, player one? CAPE OF THE WOUND-LICKER *Equip* —> Choose one: 

anal insight 

or 

anal innocence?

To understand this current show is to understand the artist’s preoccupation with pleasure; verse poetry and gay maturity (mid-30s, “early middle-age, as Patrick calls it); and how Pokémon and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s unfinished magnum opus, Petrolio, bookended the first chapter of digitally networked life. 

Patrick's second solo exhibition with the gallery, “Writing,” is about mind, body, history, language, vision. It’s inside this new space—Giovanni’s Room 2.0, a former printing press and acting studio, now home to Leslie Jordan’s ghost—that Patrick’s stretcher bars open up into “portals,” and one can encounter the flash poetics and one-word answers to Life’s Big Questions. 

The artist is also winking at the etymological link between “text” and “textile” (both from the Latin texere, meaning “to weave”). According to Anni Albers’s 1963 fiber artist’s bible, “On Weaving,” color should be “third in importance” for weavers, and after is texture, then “yarn character.” Each thread, each stitch, is a line of text. The metaphor here is not hard to grasp: text-based works designed like garments but stretched like paintings, where each piece invites the viewer to engage with its tactile and conceptual tension.  

Back to earlier. Did you choose correctly? “This is a show of anal insight,” Patrick says. “You open your ass to learn to speak.” He’s talking about that gay gift of gab but also the “the fag life/experience/aesthetic.” Like Ed Ruscha’s "word" works, this vocabulary is a lifelong joke that never ends but remains deadly serious. 

Among Patrick’s rhetorical Club sandwiches and literary Easter eggs are references to Magic: The Gathering playing cards, Giovanni di Paolo, Derek Jarman, Albrecht Dürer, and Yoshi’s Island. Works made in the last six to seven months of puzzling out composition, mark making, color theory, self-portraiture, and inkjet prints. Some images you can make out behind the fabric, like his hole on main; others, you can barely see, like a white line drawing of Pasolini reading in the buff a few weeks before his murder by a 17-year-old gigolo (allegedly).

***

The question of what constitutes “clothing” versus “art” is boring but inevitable, and Patrick understands why we’re asking these questions over and over again. The difference is a “question of labor, and labor rights, and it’s also a question of commodity and taxation and freedom of movement across borders,” the artist told Vogue at his exhibition with fashion designer Jonathan Anderson’s flagship store during Milan Design Week. It turns out Hell isn’t other people; scientists have actually located it in that nebulous overlap where fashion, design, and art meet. 

The same logic applies to literary merit (Patrick has an MFA in fiction from UC Riverside) or video games (Patrick might as well have a degree in this, too.) But if all art is political and all weaving is a discipline of resilience, then where do we draw the line between pink pussy hat craftivism and textiles as an art movement? Carroll again offers words where mine fail: “I don’t know how to make art that doesn't feel bulldozed by the present moment, but also that doesn't completely feel beside the point.” Two things can be true at once: Kandinsky painted on both sides, and your future doctor is using ChatGPT to pass med school.

***

“L.A.’s enjoying a conceptual renaissance,” Giovanni’s Room owner Jeremy Maldonado tells me when I ask him, “why Patrick, why now?” Art fair boys and gallery girls are still riding the ketamine high off a post-COVID DIY literary-residential gallery-alt-theater wave. “But, girl, the tariffs…” you scream at me while I mind my own business trying to write this fucking exhibition text. To be a contrarian Los Angeles artist is really hot right now, Jeremy says, but “Patrick’s work is just as commercial as it’s not: he can turn it on and off like a light switch.” I have a Patrick Carroll on my office wall. It hangs next to my Samsung Frame TV that’s usually set to the Hermitage or Museo del Prado. I bought it during Patrick’s first Giovanni’s Room exhibit, called “Reading,” two years ago (“Reading” and “Writing,” get it?) It’s a pale pink loose stitch: “SENTIENCE.” Glitter strands fall out from under the frame. Sentience, in my opinion, means the line between living and death, and I can only ever write under the threat of violence or a total comprehension that I will someday die.

Grieving his father’s death in the early days of the pandemic, Patrick learned to knit using a 1970s Studio SK-560 machine found on Craigslist. He sourced leftovers from European apparel companies—recycled wool, linen, mohair, silk, cashmere—and spun them into dainty and sumptuous and enviable stuff. “He sits there for hours in his studio like he’s in ‘Girl, Interrupted,’” Jeremy tells me. At the same time, The New York Times Style Magazine has called his knits “an antidote to loneliness.” 

In self-timer mode, he was hawking his wares online, first as thirst traps, then as something else. He mounted the text-based knits onto stretcher bars and hung them up. The rectangles of different sizes and proportions together created a "modular chorus.” It was art. “Language is a body, a living creature,” wrote the late John Berger, but “writing is an offshoot of something deeper.”