Dreams Like Buried Treasure:
Patrice Aphrodite Helmar on life and photography
By Francesca Du Brock, Chief Curator
Jan. 23, 2025
Artist Patrice Helmar creates work informed by the experience of growing up in a working-class family in Alaska, by their queer identity, and by an enduring curiosity about places that have been mythologized and misunderstood by upper-class America. Rural areas with strong regional identities and complex histories are of particular interest. Although they work primarily in photography, Helmar frequently creates installations incorporating ephemera from family archives, found objects, moving image, and music, building an environment for the photographs to inhabit. They see this as a gesture of generosity to the viewer, asking, “How can I make somebody care about a picture as much as I do? I don’t know if it’s possible, but I can try.”
The work is atmospheric and moody, capable of transmitting feelings of alienation and communion, of rootedness and displacement, of woundedness and healing. The series Polaris considers the artist’s relationship to their hometown of Juneau, Alaska, and the people who live there. Images of mudslides, mining ruins, and industrial debris are intermixed with spawned-out salmon, dense thickets of fireweed, and sensitive portraits of friends and strangers in backyards and local bars.
Helmar says of this work, “I love Alaska, but I don't feel the Jack London, 'Call of the Wild' that others do who have intentionally made their home here. I love it in a complicated, intergenerational-trauma way; in a Jim Carroll, ‘People Who Died’ way; in an Iris Dement, ‘Our Town’ way; in a Hazel Dickens, ‘Hills of Home’ way; in a Pogues, ‘Dirty Old Town’ way.”
Helmar grew up in Juneau, spending many of their early years hand-trolling for salmon with their parents. In 1989, the Exxon Valdez oil spill precipitated a market crash in the price of salmon, and Helmar’s parents decided to give up commercial fishing and open a small camera shop. Nurtured by their family and community, Helmar developed an early love of reading, drawing, and making images, though they didn’t identify as an artist until much later in life, confessing that “it’s such a bougie thing to admit that you are.”
Helmar instead pursued work as a bartender and teacher for much of their 20s and early 30s. They consider that time “a PhD in life, where you really learn to be in the world. It’s definitely informed who I am and how I make work today.”
Indeed, much of Helmar’s work conveys a sense of easy intimacy cultivated through the ability to identify with and relate to strangers. When speaking about their work, Helmar frequently weaves together references to writers and thinkers as well as friends and family, collaging quotes and anecdotes in a way that belies the importance of research and relationship to their practice.
Jorge Luis Borges’ poem Matthew XV:30 is a touchstone for their approach to life and artmaking. In the poem, Borges inventories a great list of things the world offers up to the poet, including: “scent of the honeysuckle,/love and the imminence of love and intolerable remembering,/ dreams like buried treasure, generous luck,/and memory itself, where a glance can make men dizzy—”
Helmar resonates with this idea of the responsibility of the artist to respond to experiences both mundane and ecstatic: “There’s all this material that you’re given as an artist in life; what do you make of it, this experience of being human? I think one of the reasons we make art is because it enables us to bear the weight of the fact that you lose everybody that you love, and then…you don’t last forever, either.”
Helmar reflects that their path into photography was shaped significantly by growing up in pre-internet Alaska, where, without the ability to travel, it was very hard to have a sense of what was going on in contemporary art. Their early art heroes were largely 20th-century photographers, people like Helen Levitt, Bressaï, and Berenice Abbot. Artist friends in Juneau like Buddy Tabor, Sarah Ritter, and Ricky Tagaban inspired their work and pushed them to keep creating, but ultimately, Helmar left Alaska to find a community of photographers that could help spur growth.
Currently based between New York and Cambridge, where they teach undergraduates at Harvard University, Helmar has an active artistic life that includes producing new work, traveling, teaching, and mentoring up-and-coming photographers.
Helmar is drawn to photography, in part, because they see it as a democratic art form that can also be practiced as a trade and commercialized more easily than other media like painting, sculpture, or installation. This grounding is a vital element of Helmar’s identity and ethos—poetic flare tempered by real-world concerns, including financial and material constraints.
When asked about their ideal audience, Helmar is quick to point to neighbors and friends and the places that have shaped them. “I hope my viewers are people from my hometown, or people from rural places and working-class backgrounds that come from where I come from. Alaska doesn’t let you forget who you are, which is a very good thing.”
This residency program is supported by the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust.
