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.
