Exposed Interiors

Through a series of site interventions within the historic and antique-furnished spaces of Campbell House Museum, Peteran’s reinvented fitments of the home help us exhume the myriad of subliminal narratives and encoded messages the past has to offer, hovering like ghosts hidden, in plain sight. In the artist’s words:
My artwork is fueled by history. While this is not uncommon among artists, I specifically target the historical decorative arts, and the idea that furnishing is a primal inclination that maps our psychology more than it coddles the body. Our obsessions are in our possessions, always have been, always will be.
As we currently probe the past for answers to our sometimes sordid behaviour, I believe that just below the surface of historical glamour, design and craftsmanship are darker truths – and brighter truths – still at work, still operating on us now, still forging and foraging the political, cultural and personal future we require.
I’m chasing that.
The past can still prod and nag us . . . if we let it.