HABITAT: Not Black and White

EXHIBITION Description: Various sculptural and wall-mounted objects – including 43 legs; several long cloth panels arranged as a floor-based installation; 3D found objects altered for intrigue; various presentations of OR Codes as fine art; seven (7) large cloth panels of precision, performance art and more.

HABITAT: Not Black and White

EXHIBITION STATEMENT HABITAT is an exhibition of new art – matter-of-factly reduced to black and white – that explores the global environment as a major site of exchange. The anomalous perspective may be that view as seen by a lower creature, a dog perhaps. Dogs do not see colour – as most people know. This ‘dog’ aligns strange artifacts of her interest and odd connection but additionally, assembles them with detached perplexity.

Many humans can identify with this ambivalent position. No one fully understands the world in which we currently live. No one can dogmatically say where the world came from, where it is going or why it exists. All we creatures share life on this connected site – this earth. But only some assume power and authority. Only a few can determine the fate of fellow creatures. The formula for influence is largely kept secret. This paradigm is signified in all things appearing black and white but truth is clearly, not the case.

The B/W theme originally started with interest in QR Codes (Quick Response) and their ‘pop art’ simplicity. A QR Code is a post-post-modern key to knowledge – attainable only to those who have the required electronic devises and the nous to use them. Playing with these extreme contrasts spun into many abstracted designs and simplified approaches to everyday themes. This fun and timely intercourse is paramount to the serious discussion of our planet’s future.

KEY WORDS: Environmental Conversation, QR Codes, Creative Thinking for our Time, Pattern and Design, Spirituality in the Everyday, Interactive, Non-traditional mediums.

FLOSSIE PEITSCH

HABITAT: Not White and Black

ESSAY By Dr Ewen Jarvis, Curator

Yering Station Main Gallery and Matt’s Bar Gallery, 29 July – 13 September, 2016 artgallery@yering.com                                                                           www.yering.com

Part 3 of 3

‘Access’, a somewhat less dominating work when seen from afar, becomes confronting upon closer inspection. The piece is composed of nine small canvasses arranged into a square and displayed horizontally upon a small high table. As viewers approach the table the canvasses, which have been disfigured with a knife and opened up for view, reveal nine Quick Response Codes. The work may be asking viewers to consider the possibility that what they are looking for in art is little more than a codified, prefabricated, public relations pitch, or perhaps we are being asked to look at artwork more independently, without recourse to critical commentary like the essay you are now reading. Or is the artist, as others have done before her, announcing the death of art, and suggesting the nature of what has replaced it? The meaning of the work remains tantalisingly open-ended.

Equally open-ended and suggestive are the six works in the first floor gallery. The series takes its name from the Italian musical term ‘staccato’ which denotes detachment and disconnection. In these works Peitsch has arranged a collection of the wooden wedges that accompany pre-stretched canvasses. By exercising a practice not unlike automatic writing, the resulting configurations tease the viewer with potential interpretations while eluding any definitive reading and thereby frustrating and complicating the seeing process.

Taken together the works that make up HABITAT playfully enact incursions into conventional ways of seeing and in doing so they ask us to remap the terrain of our lived experience as it relates to our domestic life, our existence as consumers, and our role as agents who can effect changes to our environment.

HABITAT builds on an expansive arts practice of thirty-eight (38) years, encompassing painting, sculpture, assemblage, collage, textile, new media and performance art. Originally from Canada, Peitsch now lives in Melbourne and has held numerous solo exhibitions throughout Australia, extensively in regional galleries in Victoria, NSW, ACT and overseas in Chicago, New York City, Detroit, Toronto, Banff in Alberta, Canada; and in prestigious group exhibition in London, England, Aarhus in Denmark and Kassel in Germany.

Peitsch graduated from Monash University with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) in 2000, Masters of Fine Art in 2002 and in 2007, she received a PhD (Creative) in Visual Art from Victoria University.

FLOSSIE PEITSCH

HABITAT: Not White and Black

ESSAY By Dr Ewen Jarvis, Curator

Yering Station Main Gallery and Matt’s Bar Gallery, 29 July – 13 September, 2016 artgallery@yering.com                                                                           www.yering.com

Part 2 of 3

Peitsch has come to use almost exclusively mediums drawn from every-day life. When Penny Mulvey (Peitsch, 2006, p 41) remarked, in an interview about art and motherhood, that Peitsch’s work seemed to revolve around the every-day, Peitsch’s response revealed the degree to which her work connects with and furthers a feminist agenda in working to re-contextualise creativity as it is manifested in domestic settings:

Women’s crafts have been disregarded in the art world. We look upon the ability to paint and sculpt as the ‘real’ skills. But many women do very artistic things in their own homes, calling them ‘cottage crafts’; this is quite peculiar because these skills are wonderful in their own right. It seems that it is only when the crafts are over one hundred years old and people no longer know how to do them that we recognise them as uniquely important and precious.

By employing and recasting domestic materials and inserting references to digital realms, alternate ways of seeing are forced upon the viewer at each turn.      BACKDROP A and B mimic sideshow tents at a carnival beneath which all manner of novelties are arranged for the consumption of the curious. In HABITAT the carnival tent contains a display of forty-six animal feet varying in size and shape. Strongly stylized with no attempt made to render the feet realistically, the collection is pure fantasy, but with a message or at least a suggestion that we could benefit from considering the point of view of creatures other than ourselves. These beguiling sculptural works that inhabit the same world as HOUSEPET dominate the gallery space with a silent language as playful as it is uncanny.

FLOSSIE PEITSCH

HABITAT: Not White and Black

ESSAY by Dr Ewen Jarvis, Curator

Yering Station Main Gallery and Matt’s Bar Gallery, 29 July – 13 September, 2016 artgallery@yering.com                                                                           www.yering.com

Part 1 of 3

‘If we needed to carry our houses and belongings with us, as do the animals, this simple requirement would curb even the most expansive desire to consume and own.’ Dr Flossie Peitsch

HOUSEPET greets visitors to Peitsch’s latest exhibition HABITAT: Not Black and White and prepares them for an encounter with a vision in which domestic rituals, environmental concerns, carnival novelty and consumer behaviour are combined and recast to confront and challenge convention.

Within the space of the exhibition, to left and right, stark black and white reign supreme, referencing QRCs (Quick Response Codes). Having identified the ‘pop art simplicity’ of these immediately recognisable digital signs, Peitsch enlists them in an act of admiration and subversion. If they are keys to knowledge, as Peitsch has observed, they are keys to a very specific kind of knowledge: a knowledge that is accessible only to those who possess the technology they depend upon, while being also a knowledge that liberates as it constricts, offering only simplified, codified simulacrums of reality.

Peitsch’s overarching concern is to see art returned to the domestic sphere and employed as a vehicle for developing communities while encouraging individual growth. To this end she takes materials that would not be out of place in a residential environment and repurposes them.

The seven panels STARDOM that hang like flags at an anarchist general assembly have an explosive energy that is at once dominating and unsettling. The once reassuring household materials they are fashioned from have been reconfigured to issue in a new way of seeing, the lineaments of which remain obscure. Perhaps a revolution of perception will emerge from the shimmering surfaces of black and white.