Open Frequency
Open Frequency is a curated online programme presenting new developments in contemporary art. Selected artists are nominated by key curators, writers and artists from across the UK. Recently profiled Scotland-based artists include Katy Dove, Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan, Camilla Low, Toby Paterson and Hayley Tompkins.
Open Frequency is a programme area of Axis, the arts council funded leading online resource for the contemporary art community.
Glasgow-based artist Mick Peter makes groups of works, often destabilising them with clashing reference points and techniques, indulging in sculpture's sleight of hand and scope for visual deception.
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Sculptures appear to be virtual readymades, but on closer viewing reveal themselves to be 'as labour-intensive as a Fischli and Weiss installation of simulacra'. (1) Recent works have primarily taken the form of drawings and sculptures. |
'In his sculptural work Peter plays with the scale of everyday objects, re-presenting them in new materials that often disturb the viewer’s perception of the weight or lightness of the original.
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He has made a number of works that mimic the design of patterned walls from municipal concrete architecture, building structures from ultra-light polystyrene and rendering it with concrete to give an unsettling presentation of something that appears literal but isn’t quite right. |
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Other sculptural works seem more playful. For example, 'K7' (2005), a gigantic cassette tape winding on a biro pen or 'Buckets and Planks' (2005), a seemingly improvised bench made of buckets, planks and a beer crate.
However, on closer inspection these objects are meticulously recreated from cardboard, rubber, paper and paint. |
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In his pen and ink drawings Peter collides surreal narrative texts with interior and exterior views that seem literal but offer no additional context to the texts they accompany.' (Kirsteen Macdonald)
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Lili Reynaud Dewar writes, 'Mick Peter’s charisma has a lot to do with Des Esseintes’ manic-depressive personality. Peter’s creativity and spontaneous ability to go far beyond the frontiers of bourgeois good taste resembles Des Esseintes’ taste for the peculiar and sublime, and his violent rejection of the middle classes’ fashions and trends. |
Peter’s brutal and rude sculptural methods connect him to the likes of Martin Kippenberger and Franz West, who I always imagined as some deviant and egocentric country squires.
 
Peter’s identity is divided, torn between the psyche of an urbane aristocrat and that of a bumpkin. He shows similar symptoms of a scattered state in his relation to time. His figurative creations often emerge from contradictory time layers, as if erected from some underground museum of random objects. This might be the sign of a healthy disrespect towards objects and anything too static. If forced to keep still, Peter would quickly plunge into complete apathy. In his case fidgeting is a recovery method and should be encouraged.' (2)
Flim Flam
Flim Flam, Peter's most recent group exhibition (Cell Project Space, London) featured five British sculptors who work directly with a range of lo-tech materials to produce a combination of rigorous method and fragility. Flimflam – a term for deception, a swindle – is a confidence trick where artists use the ephemeral quality of material to declare far more ambitious ideas, often making visual references to the more heavy weight formalist responses present within 20th-century modernist or minimalist sculpture.
| Reviewing the exhibition David Barret writes, 'Mick Peter is an artist that could never be accused of having a light touch, even when his works toy with the idea of instant sculptures and disposability. |
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For example, his 'Buckets, Planks, Crate' sculpture appears as a virtual readymade, but it is actually as labour-intensive as a Fischli and Weiss installation of simulacra; the work consists of two planks bridging a couple of buckets and a bottle crate, but each element is made by hand – the buckets are rubber, the rest is card and paper.
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His large sculpture, 'NOPE', inverts the construction/effort equation by appearing to be a fairly major concrete grid structure supporting an oversized gaming die, but the sculpture is in fact roughly fashioned out of polystyrene and has been given a thin coating of cement. |
A playful touch is that the indented numbers in the die are made from ping-pong ball halves – a winning physical coincidence that elevates the work from nihilism. In fact, both of Peter's sculptures display his usual wit and, through this, stave off conceptual closure.' (3)
Biography
Peter studied at the Ruskin School of Fine Art, Oxford (1994-97) and Glasgow School of Art (MFA, 1998-2000). In 2005 he received a research grant from the Scottish Executive as part of Entente Cordiale and a British Council award for projects in Paris and Rochechouart. Recent exhibitions include Flim Flam (Cell Project Space, London, 2006), Like it Matters, CCA, Glasgow (with Karla Black, Michael Stumpf, Bas Jan Ader,Robert Rauschenberg, Bruce Nauman and Carolee Schneemann), and Re-Escape, Hamburg, with Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (2005). Peter will have a solo exhibition at Transmission in autumn 2006.
For more on Mick Peter, visit his website on www.mickpeter.com
References
(1) David Barret, Art Monthly, no. 294, March 2006, p. 24
(2) From the poster publication to accompany the exhibition The Rings of Saturn curated by Kirsteen Macdonald, The Changing Room, Stirling 2004).
(3) David Barret, 2006. Flim Flam featured Lolly Batty, Saron Hughes, Lilian Lijn, Sara MacKillop and Mick Peter. |