Cory Peeke

Artist's Statement:
Collage is the vehicle by which I explore social and cultural conceptions of identity. Through direct appropriation from a variety of sources, including health manuals, child rearing texts, how-to and vintage children’s coloring books as well as found photographs, I construct evocative and often humorous juxtapositions of text and image in order to illuminate our society's reactionary and often ridiculous relation to identity stereotypes.

Whether related to race, personal style, gender distinction or socio-political movements, color has historically played an active role in the construction of these identity concepts. Color is enduringly linked with nearly all of the better-known racial and sexual prejudices. As David Batchelor writes in
his book Chromophobia:

“…colour is made out to be the property of some ‘foreign’ body-usually the
feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the
pathological.”

My interest in color and its relationship to classification and identity, coupled with my love of discarded materials, has led to my work with paint samples, the kind available at most any hardware store. The samples act as a nod to both the act of appropriation (sampling) and the element of decoration inherent in the work. The experiments with found color allow me to investigate its use as a nearly subliminal communicator of meaning. The paint swatch pieces, though more subtle and less focused on the subject of sexual identity than my earlier work, are, however, a natural evolution of my investigation of the subject. The paint swatch series subtly acknowledges and contends with ideas of sexual, gender, racial and class stereotyping associated with particular colors as well as certain design professions. While the use of mundane discarded minutia (found photographs, tags, children’s coloring book images, etc.), elegant little remnants of the everyday allow the work to be viewed not only as art but as vestiges of our daily existence.