Peter Roux
My work is driven by the natural world, and how we experience it. I see my work as pictures about juxtaposition- of things to other things, of image to experience, of us to the world around us.
I’m interested in how we relate to the world, the outer spaces we take in. I use landscape as the entry for the work. Sky, water, place. I’m drawn to these spaces, but also drawn to how we experience them daily- particularly through images, and how the language of images informs that experience. Photography, film, the frequency of imagery- these intakes help define how we see the world around us. It’s what we see, and how we see.
The language of editing is foundational in image production, and cropping is of particular interest to me. The decisions made around what we see in an image, the format, dimensional relationships- these all affect the viewing experience, and our response. I’ve been interested in exploring less conventional edges and limits in the work- extreme verticals, cube structures, object and subject- as content drivers. They all create, for me, different places to go.
The images I create aren't the things they represent- they're not clouds, not land. They're substance on surface, creating illusion, standing in. This push/pull of illusory space against other types of marks, more abstract in nature- it’s a back and forth dialogue that speaks about the beautiful artifice of image as much as anything else.
In some of my pieces, this dialogue is barely present...in others, it plays front and center. We see signifiers in abstraction, and abstract relationships in representation.
Additionally, while my very dire concerns about our treatment of the environment are not the primary driving force in my work, I can’t ignore them. They seep in. Perhaps as metaphor, perhaps directly.
The subject of the outside world around me is a rich and endless mine- so I continue working in my response to it. It helps me place myself, yet also think outside of myself. In the end, all art is a collective of voices from a point in time, about our time. These are some of mine.