S/PLI/T: How long have you been working on site-responsive projects?
Allison Peck: During grad school and I became aware of different modes of working. As soon as I started doing more installation-based work, I felt better about art. I still have trouble making discrete objects and putting them on a wall. It feels alienating and doesn’t make sense for me. I’m invested in making objects, ephemera, and other expressions that work together to move the viewer’s vision and/or body across the space, to engage with it in a new way.
S/: What is your take on the difference between site-specific and site-responsive?
AP: I feel like site-specific art delves into the history and function of a space, pulling it apart in an intellectual way to make work with a specific thesis, that will lose its meaning without the site. And of course there’s a powerful material or formal component, but it’s different from what I do. I’m responding to the site in a way that is generated from a place of intuiting and dialoguing with the elements, histories, and imperfections of a space – like I’m talking to a close friend. It feels like a more feminine approach to knowledge that’s not codified or confined.
I very much have my own personal agenda in what I create – I want it to reflect the layers of complexity that I visualize in real time or as an imagined future.
S/: You're accessing the space and responding to the formal elements, the actual physical place of it.
AP: Yeah, it’s fluid. It’s me picking and choosing. I think that’s where the difference lies. It’s more mystical and intuitive, and highly personal, but I think that makes it more accessible.
S/: Are you less worried about trying to respond to the whole history of the space, responding to it directly instead?
AP: Exactly. That’s a big part of it. I haven't been to the ‘Pataphysical space yet so I’m operating on my own, creating these blue plastic pieces in the studio first. I’m also researching the ’Pataphysical and that has been generative. When I first started reading about it I bumped up against this notion of the absurd. I read about a ‘Pataphysical society in London that gets together and writes useless legislation and rules having to do with nothing significant. It seemed pointless, and I was getting frustrated – so I went further back and read about the founder, Alfred Jarry, to see who he was as a person and what he was actually thinking about. His absurdist theater was more of a byproduct of his philosophy, a way to piss off bourgeois society, which he did really well. But then you read some of his other writing and you get a sense of a person who was very concerned with creating a radical future and making people question. Now I appreciate more that uselessness and absurdity can disrupt guises of power and authority.
I think a lot about the way existence is spoken about scientifically and how this overlaps with the magical, spiritual field – sort of like a Venn diagram. Both fields are really talking about the same thing, just using different language and positions to explain it. And that’s what Jarry does to some extent – he engages the logical and the poetic simultaneously to create an expansion.
S/: It highlights how much of research is a codified exercise versus dealing with the substance of what you're actually researching. Social structures make it seem important when it can be completely absurd.
A: Yes, it can be a pitfall for artists. All you have to do is say “I’m doing research and it’s art” and everyone is like “Oh yeah totally!”
S/: We’re curious to know about your recent show in France. Could you tell us more about that?
AP: The show was in a medieval chapel in this tiny town in south central France. I really fell in love with the site. But there were a lot of parameters to contend with. I couldn't paint on the wall like I usually do. There was one very thin piece of wood circling the walls, and that’s the only place I could attach my work to the walls. So I made a lot of objects, and object-drawings.
The drawings for the show were inspired in part by the drawings done by my students. I teach art to kids and was looking at some of their early mark making. It’s always very circular, which is psychologically related to the self – the shape of a circle being a stand-in for self. Also with the circles I wanted to talk about quantum physics and space and motion and vibrational waves, and structures of all sizes from subatomic to cosmic levels, and their interrelatedness.
I included a text that gets at these ideas within the work. The text points to the work and the work points back to the text and then they both point out of the space. So it’s about looking elsewhere and continuing that process of looking.
S/: For this S/PLI/T show you're not only responding to the site, but to Rives’ work as well. What has that been like and how do you think that will affect your process?
AP: I’m excited to work directly with her work in the space when I get there. It’s another layer of complexity to consider. She has already influenced my color choices. The blues and the pinks are coming from the videos she's presenting. It’s great – I love talking to other artists who are working in the same vein. We both think about color as an object. I like our similar sensibilities. We’re both are very informed by painting, even though we’re not always making paintings in the traditional sense.
I rarely make a canvas but I think about painting the most, and I think about the installation as an expanded painting. She does a similar thing where she creates her paintings in 3D and makes videos of them. The repetitive actions that she produces seem to engage the idea of the absurd and that works really well in relation to the ‘Pataphysical.
S/: Rives definitely thinks about her videos functioning as activated paintings, which is why we displayed them side by side.
AP: Right, her videos are paintings that are taking up physical space on the wall. They become an object in the space. It’s cool.
S/: Colors can be objects; screens can be objects.
AP: I think so. Her subject matter is about that slippery space between “reality” and the digital. In terms of identity or sensuality, having screens as these mitigating factors in communication and experience is interesting. I’ve been thinking about screens a lot and the weirdness and limitations they present, the physicality and non-physicality of them.
S/: What are some readings or other things that have been informing your practice lately?
AP: I’m always reading poetry. It’s really important to my practice because its abstracts language in the same way I want my work to abstract space. I’ve been reading Wendell Berry and I’m using a poem of his in the text I’m writing for the show.
My last show in France revolved around a Rumi poem, which is unexpectedly fresh and contemporary for being written a thousand years ago. Wendell Berry is interesting to me because of his relationship to the land as a farmer, getting at the spiritual through the ordinary. The Rumi poem arrived organically, but I sought out Berry’s poetry as someone who talks about the natural world.
S/: Is the natural world something that plays into your work a lot?
AP: I think about nature and animals most of the time. Of course critical theory teaches me to question what is “natural.” I use plastic, a material that has become naturalized because most of what we encounter on a daily basis is plastic. I can’t really stay there though; plastic is still not natural.
Actual nature, flora and fauna, both external and internal, have been devastated and erased in many ways, for many reasons. In my life and practice, I’m trying to live more in congruence with nature and be vocal about it. We are all part of the same organism, and whatever we do to it is equally beneficial or detrimental to ourselves, because we’re part of its fabric.
Allison Peck: During grad school and I became aware of different modes of working. As soon as I started doing more installation-based work, I felt better about art. I still have trouble making discrete objects and putting them on a wall. It feels alienating and doesn’t make sense for me. I’m invested in making objects, ephemera, and other expressions that work together to move the viewer’s vision and/or body across the space, to engage with it in a new way.
S/: What is your take on the difference between site-specific and site-responsive?
AP: I feel like site-specific art delves into the history and function of a space, pulling it apart in an intellectual way to make work with a specific thesis, that will lose its meaning without the site. And of course there’s a powerful material or formal component, but it’s different from what I do. I’m responding to the site in a way that is generated from a place of intuiting and dialoguing with the elements, histories, and imperfections of a space – like I’m talking to a close friend. It feels like a more feminine approach to knowledge that’s not codified or confined.
I very much have my own personal agenda in what I create – I want it to reflect the layers of complexity that I visualize in real time or as an imagined future.
S/: You're accessing the space and responding to the formal elements, the actual physical place of it.
AP: Yeah, it’s fluid. It’s me picking and choosing. I think that’s where the difference lies. It’s more mystical and intuitive, and highly personal, but I think that makes it more accessible.
S/: Are you less worried about trying to respond to the whole history of the space, responding to it directly instead?
AP: Exactly. That’s a big part of it. I haven't been to the ‘Pataphysical space yet so I’m operating on my own, creating these blue plastic pieces in the studio first. I’m also researching the ’Pataphysical and that has been generative. When I first started reading about it I bumped up against this notion of the absurd. I read about a ‘Pataphysical society in London that gets together and writes useless legislation and rules having to do with nothing significant. It seemed pointless, and I was getting frustrated – so I went further back and read about the founder, Alfred Jarry, to see who he was as a person and what he was actually thinking about. His absurdist theater was more of a byproduct of his philosophy, a way to piss off bourgeois society, which he did really well. But then you read some of his other writing and you get a sense of a person who was very concerned with creating a radical future and making people question. Now I appreciate more that uselessness and absurdity can disrupt guises of power and authority.
I think a lot about the way existence is spoken about scientifically and how this overlaps with the magical, spiritual field – sort of like a Venn diagram. Both fields are really talking about the same thing, just using different language and positions to explain it. And that’s what Jarry does to some extent – he engages the logical and the poetic simultaneously to create an expansion.
S/: It highlights how much of research is a codified exercise versus dealing with the substance of what you're actually researching. Social structures make it seem important when it can be completely absurd.
A: Yes, it can be a pitfall for artists. All you have to do is say “I’m doing research and it’s art” and everyone is like “Oh yeah totally!”
S/: We’re curious to know about your recent show in France. Could you tell us more about that?
AP: The show was in a medieval chapel in this tiny town in south central France. I really fell in love with the site. But there were a lot of parameters to contend with. I couldn't paint on the wall like I usually do. There was one very thin piece of wood circling the walls, and that’s the only place I could attach my work to the walls. So I made a lot of objects, and object-drawings.
The drawings for the show were inspired in part by the drawings done by my students. I teach art to kids and was looking at some of their early mark making. It’s always very circular, which is psychologically related to the self – the shape of a circle being a stand-in for self. Also with the circles I wanted to talk about quantum physics and space and motion and vibrational waves, and structures of all sizes from subatomic to cosmic levels, and their interrelatedness.
I included a text that gets at these ideas within the work. The text points to the work and the work points back to the text and then they both point out of the space. So it’s about looking elsewhere and continuing that process of looking.
S/: For this S/PLI/T show you're not only responding to the site, but to Rives’ work as well. What has that been like and how do you think that will affect your process?
AP: I’m excited to work directly with her work in the space when I get there. It’s another layer of complexity to consider. She has already influenced my color choices. The blues and the pinks are coming from the videos she's presenting. It’s great – I love talking to other artists who are working in the same vein. We both think about color as an object. I like our similar sensibilities. We’re both are very informed by painting, even though we’re not always making paintings in the traditional sense.
I rarely make a canvas but I think about painting the most, and I think about the installation as an expanded painting. She does a similar thing where she creates her paintings in 3D and makes videos of them. The repetitive actions that she produces seem to engage the idea of the absurd and that works really well in relation to the ‘Pataphysical.
S/: Rives definitely thinks about her videos functioning as activated paintings, which is why we displayed them side by side.
AP: Right, her videos are paintings that are taking up physical space on the wall. They become an object in the space. It’s cool.
S/: Colors can be objects; screens can be objects.
AP: I think so. Her subject matter is about that slippery space between “reality” and the digital. In terms of identity or sensuality, having screens as these mitigating factors in communication and experience is interesting. I’ve been thinking about screens a lot and the weirdness and limitations they present, the physicality and non-physicality of them.
S/: What are some readings or other things that have been informing your practice lately?
AP: I’m always reading poetry. It’s really important to my practice because its abstracts language in the same way I want my work to abstract space. I’ve been reading Wendell Berry and I’m using a poem of his in the text I’m writing for the show.
My last show in France revolved around a Rumi poem, which is unexpectedly fresh and contemporary for being written a thousand years ago. Wendell Berry is interesting to me because of his relationship to the land as a farmer, getting at the spiritual through the ordinary. The Rumi poem arrived organically, but I sought out Berry’s poetry as someone who talks about the natural world.
S/: Is the natural world something that plays into your work a lot?
AP: I think about nature and animals most of the time. Of course critical theory teaches me to question what is “natural.” I use plastic, a material that has become naturalized because most of what we encounter on a daily basis is plastic. I can’t really stay there though; plastic is still not natural.
Actual nature, flora and fauna, both external and internal, have been devastated and erased in many ways, for many reasons. In my life and practice, I’m trying to live more in congruence with nature and be vocal about it. We are all part of the same organism, and whatever we do to it is equally beneficial or detrimental to ourselves, because we’re part of its fabric.
