Parallax Art

Joe Patterson was born before the end of WW-II in a little town in New Mexico called Hot Springs. The town soon changed its name to Truth or Consequences. He has always considered this an omen that he should keep in mind. Joe arrived in Tucson, only a week old and watched this town grow for 77 years. The Vietnam War interrupted his graduate studies in psychology and took him to Shreveport, Louisiana for two years as Personnel Psychologist in the Army Induction Station. There he tested draftees to see if they were literate enough to read the label on a box of explosives or moral enough to kill Vietcong but not fellow Americans. Joe returned to Tucson, completed his doctorate after living in the desert for a year and then he founded Desert Survivors, a human support organization based on desert surviving plants. Joe then traveled the country consulting to developmental disabilities organizations as part of the Deinstitutionalization Movement for community service development. These, and many related experiences, gave him the “parallax perspective” that is expressed in his art and summarized in the phrase, “What you see depends on your point of view.”