Patrick McGuire grew up in the Rustbelt city of Buffalo and rural western New York. He had a job as a laborer in a steel mill at age 18. The blast furnace dept. where he worked exposed him to a nightmarish environment of molten steel and slag, traincars full of dangerous by-products, massive-scale machines and interior spaces, and life threatening, situations at every turn. These scenes had a life-long effect on his sense of visual aesthetics. He found a harsh, dark, beauty in the huge vista of 19th century buildings and now defunct mechanical devices. Ever since, he has enjoyed visiting abandoned, deserted, factories and decaying, haunted sites of industrial scale manufacturing such as San Francisco’s Hunters Point, Virginia City Nevada, and Bethlehem Steel’s gigantic miles-long shuttered old steel works. For Patrick these places always feel haunted by the ghosts of their former occupants.
Patrick also likes to find interesting textures, patterns and colors in ordinary consumer products, and near invisible objects in every-day urban cityscapes. He studied Architectural Design, Photography, and Creative Writing at Sierra Nevada College and CCSF. He studied Video Production at Palm Beach Junior College. Patrick has worked with his hands as a carpenter and general contractor (retired) for over forty years. Much of his work involves used, cast off construction materials such as wood beams, rusted iron/steel, and other found objects. He currently lives in the Inner Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco.
