Milly Peck
Rinse and Repeat
2 - 29 January 2018 | Domino Houses Billboard, Bounds Green Road, N22 8YB
Applying a stubbornly cartoonish register of drawing to both two-dimensional and lumpen materials, Milly Peck's work mines the area between flat image and three-dimensional object. Graphically rendering images pulled from the everyday into chunky outlines or dumb, prop-like cutouts, the work tussles with trying to function as both a flat, pictorial image and a three-dimensional, scenographic landscape. Often drawing influence from the over-saturated optical fields of advertising and commercial display, Milly attempts to create an ambiguous territory where there is potential for comical misinterpretation and clumsy exaggeration. This visual disorientation aims to prompt us to reconsider and reimagine both our perceptual and physical understanding of the things we use and consume as well as to test ideas surrounding perspective, authenticity and value.
Rinse and Repeat parodies the format of the billboard as a physical site for the continual regeneration of the image. Responding to the surrounding area and the amenities which neighbour the billboard, the local carwash takes centre stage. Typically used for commercial advertising, the billboard’s function is inverted becoming a mirror to the everyday and the carwash is transformed into a performative space for this banal, cyclical activity to take place. Divided into a triptych, the billboard nods towards image cells used in comic books where the ‘gutter’, being the gaps in between these frames, becomes the outer world and in turn a potential extension of the narrative within the image. Enlarged out of proportion, this ordinary scene is newly farcical, limp mops almost standing in for trees in the surrounding landscape and a gigantic hand looming over passing onlookers.
Milly Peck completed a Masters in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 2016 and graduated from The Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University in 2012. She was awarded The David Troostwyk/Matt’s Gallery Studio Award in 2016 and the Villiers David Travel Award in 2015. She was also an AA2A Artist in Residence at Wimbledon College of Art 2013 – 14. | www.millypeck.com