Patricia Maus

I am a New Orleans–based visual artist whose work examines how people move through social, technological, emotional, and cultural systems—and how those systems shape behavior, memory, and individual agency. I work primarily in painting, drawing, and assemblage, moving between conceptual figuration and abstraction. Across these forms, I am interested in what can be suggested rather than fully explained: a gesture, an arrangement of bodies, an emptied space, a repeated form.

Earlier bodies of work grew from experiences of memory, loss, human connection, and collective life. My current work increasingly turns toward the structures that operate around us but often remain unseen. In Ordinary Systems, simplified figures inhabit familiar environments while algorithms, automation, social platforms, and other forms of mediated influence remain outside the picture. Their presence is felt through repetition, attention, behavior, and the quiet surrender of choice.

I am drawn to the tension between the individual and the forces that surround them—the point at which something external becomes so ordinary that we stop noticing its influence. Rather than resolving that tension, I want the work to leave enough uncertainty for viewers to recognize something of their own experience within it.