Dec 2nd 2024 - January 31st 2024
Alcoves ( Left Window )
“Identity for artists is a treasured possession and can be clarified by its impermanence. The artist's journey is fraught with radical departures, contrived exploration and directionless nuance. How did I get here? Where am I going? What are the semiotics of the kitchen? Is paynes grey overrated? As I descend the rabbit hole I wonder if I took my medication and don’t know how to cook fish. My paintings call to me, craving an end to their conception but I know the tendrils confined within their pictorial space can’t reach me here within my wet sandbox of a mind.”
“More Will Be Revealed” is a collection of paintings spanning my time spent in art school and the work I’ve been making as I establish myself professionally since graduating. Unstretched paintings in the installation space are deliberately positioned in the back, intended as a literal and personal background. Realism and art making while attending university were synonymous to me, rendering figures, portraits and still lives were indicative of the best kind of art making. My food painting Phallic Phruits was an exercise in working through a square composition and my juvenile but closeted younger self found joy in choosing fruits resembling a phallus. Another exercise was being able to replicate someone else’s painting, one way to learn is to copy. I chose The Beginning and the End by Eric Fisch, at the time I was not considering the conceptual content of his work but now I can draw parallels between his themes of psychological tension and intimacy and my own inner turmoil as a closeted Queer person not knowing I was battling untreated ADHD.
My experience at Emily Carr University of Art+Design (ECUAD) confronted me with “why?” Previously, I was at Grant MacEwan University and there wasn't much invitation to interrogate our conceptual decision making as artists as the institution favoured technical development. Ironically I was encouraged to explore abstraction by my instructors at ECUAD on the basis that I wanted to. I explored automatism and employed the subconscious, intuitively mapping out a composition and carving out rendered shapes in the pictorial space. Over time this methodology became fundamental to a lexicon of different gestures, the paintings in the foreground of the installation are a fantastical representation of how I perceive my trains of thought swelling and stretching, undulating through a predictably ridged world.
Houndstooth, a recognizable pattern of Scottish heritage, provides—a frustratingly tedious pattern to paint precisely—a framework for tender biomorphic shapes to caress and drape themselves over. Despite a desire for radical departure, these two distinguishing elements of my current work offer axes, directing my unfocused mind towards their combined and individual nuances.
Alcoves ( Left Window )
“Identity for artists is a treasured possession and can be clarified by its impermanence. The artist's journey is fraught with radical departures, contrived exploration and directionless nuance. How did I get here? Where am I going? What are the semiotics of the kitchen? Is paynes grey overrated? As I descend the rabbit hole I wonder if I took my medication and don’t know how to cook fish. My paintings call to me, craving an end to their conception but I know the tendrils confined within their pictorial space can’t reach me here within my wet sandbox of a mind.”
“More Will Be Revealed” is a collection of paintings spanning my time spent in art school and the work I’ve been making as I establish myself professionally since graduating. Unstretched paintings in the installation space are deliberately positioned in the back, intended as a literal and personal background. Realism and art making while attending university were synonymous to me, rendering figures, portraits and still lives were indicative of the best kind of art making. My food painting Phallic Phruits was an exercise in working through a square composition and my juvenile but closeted younger self found joy in choosing fruits resembling a phallus. Another exercise was being able to replicate someone else’s painting, one way to learn is to copy. I chose The Beginning and the End by Eric Fisch, at the time I was not considering the conceptual content of his work but now I can draw parallels between his themes of psychological tension and intimacy and my own inner turmoil as a closeted Queer person not knowing I was battling untreated ADHD.
My experience at Emily Carr University of Art+Design (ECUAD) confronted me with “why?” Previously, I was at Grant MacEwan University and there wasn't much invitation to interrogate our conceptual decision making as artists as the institution favoured technical development. Ironically I was encouraged to explore abstraction by my instructors at ECUAD on the basis that I wanted to. I explored automatism and employed the subconscious, intuitively mapping out a composition and carving out rendered shapes in the pictorial space. Over time this methodology became fundamental to a lexicon of different gestures, the paintings in the foreground of the installation are a fantastical representation of how I perceive my trains of thought swelling and stretching, undulating through a predictably ridged world.
Houndstooth, a recognizable pattern of Scottish heritage, provides—a frustratingly tedious pattern to paint precisely—a framework for tender biomorphic shapes to caress and drape themselves over. Despite a desire for radical departure, these two distinguishing elements of my current work offer axes, directing my unfocused mind towards their combined and individual nuances.
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James Peach Artist Statement
James Peach is a queer artist based in Vancouver with a BFA from Emily Carr University for Art + Design. Peaches primary focus after graduating amidst the COVID-19 epidemic is painting.
While at ECUAD, Peach grappled with addiction and undiagnosed Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder; the paintings submitted, reminiscent of their work during their time at ECUAD, represent a diversified and refined approach to volume and colour. Initially inspired by abstract expressionism and surrealism, Peach explored automatism.
Peach's work in some ways is dependent on the subconscious, and seeks to be more intentful when composing their vividly colourful and organic shapes. Contradictory to the automatists approach Peach composes the painting with strategic focal points letting the forms grow towards one another, taking on their own volume, instinctively they allow the shapes to advance, recede and intertwine through the pictorial space.
Peach, influenced by the shapes of ears, they imagine the paintings as expansive and tangible places, acting as a network, communicating conscious and subconscious thoughts. Protruding shapes infer ideas of focus while tendril-like ones infer fleeting or intrusive thoughts.
Manifesting these art objects are a meditative practice helping to focus the racing thoughts of an ADHD addict's brain.
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