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.
