It began as an obsession: a longing to know an unknowable, amorphous other. Across the street or an IP neighbor, a fabricated entity existing in the negative space of the screen. Their inky eyes hungrily consume the world, listlessly lapping up a pictorial ration from pixelated troughs. Everyone and no one, they float without contest in a vapid and all-consuming sea of flickering sights and eager eyes. Picturing Plastic Peonies suggests a collection of ephemera, an amassing of image and text forming an uneasy and capricious identity. The sights they choose, consigned to memory or to a new rephotographics. Lust, longing, and languor sustain a life of isolated looking. An uneasy and shifting identity rears its head as seeing and living merge into one incomprehensible mass. This figuration has no bounds, the screen’s mediation is ubiquitous and evasive, indistinguishable from the air.
picturing plastic peonies