Hilary Pecis
Kingdom
Kingdom, detail
Up To No Good
Up to No Good, Detail
About The Artist
A native Californian, Hilary Pecis resides and works from the city of San Francisco, where she is a recent MFA graduate from California College of the Arts, receiving awards such as SF Weekly’s Mastermind Grant and San Francisco Arts Commission’s Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship, and also being featured in publications such as New American Painters.
Pecis’ work is a depiction of landscapes influenced by Internet, television and other media sources. Images and shards from glossy magazine pages are reassembled into a surrogate image within the new composition in combination with code imbedded drawings of rock formations.
With an interest and focus on the interchangeability of images and the capability to perceive and ignore them, Hilary Pecis draws attention to how we are conditioned by the media’s overwhelming supply of information. (Guerrero Gallery)
Hilary Pecis interviewed by Jess Wheaton
JW: I’ve seen your work described as post-apocalyptic, and representative of new beginnings too. Do you hold a narrative in your mind as you work?
HP: Yes, I do have a loose narrative that informs my work. I used to think of the landscapes as post-apocalyptic places comprised of codes and data. Now, I don’t think of them so much as ‘post,’ but rather present.
JW: I also wonder how collage first entered your work, and whether that was more of a conceptual or an aesthetic choice.
HP: The collage was first introduced purely for aesthetic reasons. I liked the chance that occurred, and the variety of colors that could be found within magazines. As goes with most aspects of my artistic practice, it took me a while to accept the suggestion of using actual images from magazines to further describe what I was trying communicate.
JW: I love your use of what began as photographs of specific objects in magazines because you first abstract them by cutting them up, and then refashion them into objects again, such as rock formations. It seems the method behind your intricate excavations/combinations could convey many ideas.
HP: I like the accessibility of images in contemporary media and their calculated application and infiltration into our lives. My work has been compared to the flickering of a television or a computer screen. I like that idea because of the consumption of images that exists in both media sources. Also, I think it is safe to say that television and the Internet have been experienced universally, and therefore provide an entry point into my work. (More )
posted by Carmelita Caruana
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