Peter Roux

Artist Statement:
I work with imagery to create spaces that search for relevance with the viewer, not through "site-specific" familiarity, but rather a sense of connection, memory, or direct experience. The filmed image inspires me- how it formulates content through space, creating levels of meaning via duration, the framing/editing of image, movement. Film provides a physical border around a space, compresses it, and pre-determines the viewer's relationship to its scale. It can also "adjust" the detail a viewer explores through the blurring of subject, creating entirely new aspects of form. The tension between these softened objects and the hard border of a filmed frame is intriguing to me, as is the ability to alter content with a simple cut or splice. It is as much a comment on the space between the viewer and subject as on the subject itself. I'm fascinated by that space.
The filmed image also has a physical life, in the celluloid on a movie reel; in addition to suggesting time through movement, it can take on the stresses of its life via scratches, blemishes, and altered surfaces. These become integral aspects of the form, and begin to shift the content. I'm drawn to the physicality of the art object-the surface quality, the weight, formal aspects of cool abstraction, the manipulation of a medium. These physical considerations are what move me to explore with the dynamics of paint rather than photo or film. However, by drawing on these mediums in my work, I am searching for a new interpretation of "landscape space"- one that is quieter, perhaps, and less direct, but one that holds for the viewer a larger contemporary experience.