"Hopper-Feeder" by Patrick Fitzgerald

This three-dimensional collage entitled "Hopper-Feeder” by Chicago artist Patrick Fitzgerald finds its place alongside his series of abstract “track paintings,” initially born as the imagined racetracks navigated by his miniature soap-box car sculptures. Meandering paths that twist and turn in an endless loop, the tracks have taken on a symbolic meaning to Fitzgerald, who describes them as conduits that “allow my imagination to travel along a circuitous path that continues back to a place of origin, similar to my view of life.”

In "Hopper-Feeder," a thin metal wire traces a path across collage of printed text, bouncing to and fro amid a network of rusted bottle caps, each collected by the artist from the alleyways of his Chicago neighborhood. "The work began with my focus on breaking up and reconfiguring an unreadably boring article about bottle cap manufacturing from an old 1950s industrial journal," writes Fitzgerald. "I decided to contrast the monotony of the article with a configuration involving rusty old bottle caps in various states of decay, and thereby complete some strange cycle of life within the industrial world." As with all of Fitzgerald's works, the finish was repeatedly worked to achieve a sense of age - honoring the mundane beauty of industrial mechanisms and imagining the collage as an artifact that transcends to time.

"Hopper-Feeder," 2024
Patrick Fitzgerald (b. 1962)
Collage and mixed media on wood panel. Framed.