Wade Eldean
The Wade Eldean Studio
Phone:
Fax:
The Wade Eldean Studio
Phone:
Fax:
Cory Peeke--Mixed Media/Assemblage
c o r y w . p e e k e
A r t i s t S
t a t e m e n t
Collage is the vehicle by which I explore social and cultural conceptions of identity. Through direct appropriation from a variety of sources, including health manuals, child rearing texts, how-to and vintage children’s coloring books as well as found photographs, I construct evocative and often humorous juxtapositions of text and image in order to illuminate our society's reactionary and often ridiculous relation to identity stereotypes.
Whether related to race, personal style, gender distinction or socio-political
movements, color has historically played an active role in the construction
of these identity concepts. Color is enduringly linked with nearly all of
the better-known racial and sexual prejudices. As David Batchelor writes in
his book Chromophobia:
“…colour is made out to be the property of some ‘foreign’ body-usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological.”
My interest in color and its relationship to classification and identity,
coupled with my love of discarded materials, has led to my work with paint
samples, the kind available at most any hardware store. The samples act as
a nod to both the act of appropriation (sampling) and the element of decoration
inherent in the work. The experiments with found color allow me to investigate
its use as a nearly subliminal communicator of meaning. The paint swatch pieces,
though more subtle and less focused on the subject of sexual identity than
my earlier work, are, however, a natural evolution of my investigation of
the subject. The paint swatch series subtly acknowledges and contends with
ideas of sexual, gender, racial and class stereotyping associated with particular
colors as well as certain design professions. While the use of mundane discarded
minutia (found photographs, tags, children’s coloring book images, etc.),
elegant little remnants of the everyday allow the work to be viewed not only
as art but as vestiges of our daily existence.
| |