M.A. Peers
Rosamund Felsen Gallery is pleased to present the sixth solo show of paintings and works on paper by Los Angeles-based artist M.A. Peers. Peers’ new exhibition is a summation of the two idiosyncratic areas she has explored throughout her career -- dog portraiture and painterly abstraction.
Revisiting the subject matter that generated a surprising amount of exposure when initially presented anonymously at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Peers’ latest group of canine portraits include several of the Cold War era Soviet space dogs alongside examples from her ongoing examination of purebred aesthetics.
Peers’ new landscape-derived abstractions offer a somewhat different take on the concept of “dogs in space”. Building on her previous body of abstractions which explored the inescapability of spatial illusionism through such reference points as the paranormal cultural meme of Mel’s Hole and Duchamp’s Étant donnés, the artist has been translating Romantic and Baroque painting idioms through her virtuosic painting vocabulary into abstract enunciations of the search areas she has encountered in the course of six years of Canine Nose Work practice.
Canine Nose Work is a competitive dog sport that has recently emerged from Southern California into international popularity. Based on bomb and drug detection training, Nose Work relies on interspecies communication of information derived from an olfactory landscape invisible to the human team members. The pairing of this essentially aesthetic articulation of space with de-pictorialised landscape painting traditions from the pinnacle of the Humanist era continue Peers’ ongoing skeptical examination of anthropocentric aesthetics, while offering a tentative point of departure.
M.A. Peers is a Los Angeles-based painter whose work has been exhibited internationally since her emergence from UCLA grad school in 1994.