Rashel Peddersen
Mark England
Memory is powerful part of our voyage through life and principal part of developing and encountering our identity. It has become important for me to use personal memories as vocabulary for the work I create. I began these paintings with a specific memory from childhood and sought out to find sheep. I found a carcass rotting in a farm of otherwise alive and meandering sheep. Far more intriguing than the others, the complex form was inviting in color and structure, disintegrating and still somehow full of life. The sheepís degeneration brought up the question of existence. Human existence is also one of mortality. Not only the apparent death of the sheep but the suggestion of time continuing and Living around the sheep intrigued me to paint this form.
All of my work, in some way or another, is about landscape and how we see ourselves through it and impose our values on it. My paintings are both referential and highly interpretive, depicting panoramic views of specific locations. They deal with our perceptions of time, social and environmental history, and tend to look like maps, but my ìmapsî are not accurate according to cartographic expectations. These are maps of time, culture, dreams, perceptions, the future, and how we wish to see ourselves and our history. They invite the viewer to become lost in them and then to make conscious and intuitive sense of the perceptual environment. I twist perspective, visually and historically. Because of the juxtaposing of unrelated buildings and events, each scene could be hundreds of years in the past, or in the process of being constructed, or in the future after everything has been torn down, destroyed, or worn away. My challenge is to create a visual environment that can address many seemingly unrelated time periods and issues within a coherent narrative.