Chauney Peck: Two reviews
Ride the Art
by Alec Clayton, Volcano, May 4, 2006
Chauney Peck’s installation at Icebox Contemporary Art brings to mind The Beatles’ "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds." I pictured myself in a boat on a river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies. Her art is not an illustration of Lennon’s lyrics, nor are there the psychedelic colors the song describes. The boat isn’t even on the river; it’s turned upside-down on the rocks and looks like nothing so much as an old turtle’s shell. Nevertheless, it evokes that image. That’s what art does when art does what it does. It transports the viewer. It evokes memory and reverie.
I close my eyes and look again, and now it looks like a theatrical set. I expect at any moment to see actors come out costumed as birds and squirrels and fish and fishermen. A children’s play filled with magic.
Peck’s installation is small and unpretentious, and has a bulky, cartoon look. The aforementioned boat is made of paper maché and is painted a dull brown. It rests on massive gray rocks (also paper maché) as if dragged out of the water and set that way to keep the rain out. Underneath the boat is a length of rope (not real rope, but more painted paper maché), and surrounding it are cut-out wooden shapes to represent flowing water, painted tree stumps and more rocks. On the walls are billowy clouds made from cut and assembled sheets of wood. Color changes in the clouds are formed by varying wood grains. One of the clouds looks like a giant hamburger, or perhaps an oyster in its shell. Another one is shaped like some kind of fanciful animal, or perhaps a childlike silhouette of an island.
Everything is painted in dull, chalky tones of brown, green and gray, colors in keeping with the walls and unfinished concrete floor. Forms and colors fit so well with the interior of the building, in fact, that I had to ask if something had been done to the floors and if a kind of concrete rail against one wall was part of the installation. (It’s not.)
Technically, Peck’s installation is well made. Details are minimized. It has the look of something made in a 10th grade art class or, in keeping with the look of a theatrical set, something designed to be seen from a distance.
The artist says this piece was inspired by a dream she had last spring. "Mom, Dad and I were in a rowboat fending off tree stumps and barnacle encrusted rocks with our hands. We slowly meandered through the shallow salt water. Mom lost her wedding band and we searched for it in the muck. We landed on an island. The boat washed away. We crawled on hands and
knees through thick woods. Dad was hungry."
Peck is a young artist on the go. I have admired her paintings since first seeing a piece in one of the final shows at Commencement Art Gallery. Since then she has been amazingly prolific and has had more gallery showings than most artists right out of school. She paints floral and animal forms (most commonly aquatic) with energetic brushstrokes and a staccato drawing style reminiscent of Cy Twombly. The current work is the first three-dimensional work I’ve seen from her. It’s interesting stuff. I’d like to see where she might go with this new direction. But I hope she doesn’t give up painting. This work does not have the verve of her paintings, but it does share with her paintings a fine sense of placement and weight distribution. In the paintings objects float in shallow space; in this sculptural work there is a similar feel of not-quite random placement of objects with space all around.
Icebox Contemporary Art is located at 301A Puyallup Ave. It is open third Thursdays from 7 to 9 p.m. and by appointment. For an appointment, call (206) 856-7114. Large windows provide for viewing from the street.
The eatery queen
by Alec Clayton, Volcano, March 2004
Chauney Peck may be on her way to becoming the queen of eatery art. I first discovered her a year ago when another artist recommended I check out her exhibit at The Mark in Olympia. Now she is showing a new body of work at Batdorf and Bronson. In each of these exhibits, she displayed a series of paintings based on a specific theme – fish at The Mark and now birds at Batdorf. Is this the beginning of a trend? Will we next see dogs at Tully’s and insects at the Kickstand?
I hope so. Maybe she could even extend her artistic exploration into different approaches to media for each series as she has here (her fish painting were works on paper and canvas; the bird paintings on vinyl and paper).
There are eight paintings in her current show, each modest in size, which would have been necessary because of the limited space. Each painting is acrylic on layered sheets of vinyl and paper. She uses a combination of opaque and transparent paints to maximize the effect of seeing through layer after layer, and her transparencies vary from almost invisible through degrees of translucency, and from sketchy and open marks to dense puddles of solid paint – all of which serves to unify the different levels in intriguing ways. By this I mean that the viewers can easily grasp that they are looking through layers of transparencies but cannot always tell which images are on top and which are underneath. There are also shapes that appear to have been painted on the underside of the glass that covers the paintings, although this could be an illusion. This is highly effective, but the effect falls apart in one or two paintings where shapes painted in a solid color are too obviously painted on the top layer and thus stand out like lipstick on a white shirt, and destroy the unity of the painting.
Peck paints her images with sketchy, loopy and staccato marks that are like little bursts of controlled energy in seemingly random placement. Some of her bird images are drawn with rhythmical strokes and well-defined contours and others are barely hinted at with scratchy and runny marks. Some are easily recognizable as birds, while others are seen as parts – a beak here, a wing there, a claw somewhere else. Flowing in and around these are clumps of paint that do not necessarily define anything but convey the feel of feathers, beaks, twigs, clouds and trees.
A common tendency seen in these paintings, as well as the earlier painting I reviewed a year ago, is to group her images in loosely circular patterns around the edges of the surface, leaving an open white emptiness in the middle. The ones in which she employs this devise are more successful than the ones in which she places images closer to the center. That open center with forms swirling around nearer the edges creates an exciting feel of energy. Similarly, I find that the paintings in which her forms are less defined are more exciting and better unified than the ones in which the forms are more easily read as subject matter. A squiggle of paint suggesting a tangle of bush involves the viewer in a much more lasting way than does a bird drawn with careful contour lines.
© 2006 by Alec Clayton