Charley Peters has created nine new works for MOCA London's Web Exhibitions. Fascinated by the two lives that paintings have in the contemporary visual world – the online life of the jpeg image and the real-life gallery experience of the painted surface – she has made a series of screen-based works that remix her recent paintings on canvas. Peters photographed motifs from her paintings, which she then incorporated into short animations that reconfigure them with new backgrounds, colour palettes, compositional relationships and movements. The works are accompanied by titles derived from pairs of abbreviations used in texting language and/or online gaming initialisations, written in full and put together to create new statements.
I think it’s interesting how titles can suggest meaning that may not really exist, in the same way that talking or writing about abstraction can rationalise it into something of the real world, when it actually might not fully belong there. The animations and their titles are constructed in a similar way, by re-presenting existing material and creating or changing ‘meaning’ through that process. - Charley Peters
Charley Peters makes paintings that are grounded in the legacy of abstraction and that reflect the graphically complex world in which we now live, where we simultaneously see multiple ‘windows’ on computer monitors, smartphones and digital tablets displaying disparate images at once. Peters grew up with an imagination fed by cartoons, robots, pixelated video games, heavy metal album sleeves and science fiction book covers. At art school she found Krasner, Frankenthaler, Mitchell, Kelly and Newman, and fell in love with their big, badass abstract paintings. Peters describes her work as, “grounded in the history of abstraction and haunted by a childhood spent watching too much TV.” She is intrigued by the ways in which the once radical symbols of formal abstraction have become aestheticised signifiers of the dematerialised post-digital image world though Photoshop gradients, desktop icons and coloured pixels. In her meticulously painted works intuitive smears of paint co-exist with hard-edged geometry, and the language of Modernist painting meets the familiar aesthetics of screen culture to make something new but strangely familiar.
Peters exhibits internationally, showing recently at Saatchi Gallery (London), Eagle Gallery at London Art Fair (London), Fold Gallery (London), Yantai Art Museum (Yantai), Art 2 (New York) and National Museum of Gdansk (Gdansk). Her clients include House of Vans, Facebook, ITV, Centrepoint, and Hospital Rooms. She completed a PhD in Fine Art Theory and Practice in 2006, and she has contributed writing about painting to publications that include Instantloveland, A-N and Turps Banana. She is a visiting tutor in Fine Art at City & Guilds of London Art School, a visiting painting mentor at Turps Art School and a Postgraduate Senior Lecturer at University of the Arts London.
1. Do The Right Thing, Do It Yourself, digital animation, 19 seconds 2. Sorry About That, But Then Again, digital animation, 18 seconds 3. But Seriously, You Crack Me Up, digital animation, 18 seconds 4. Fun Times Ahead, Any Day Now, digital animation, 18 seconds 5. Have The Best Time, I Won’t Remember, digital animation, 18 seconds 6. You Know What, You Take Too Long, digital animation, 18 seconds 7. In Other Words, That’s All For Now, digital animation, 17 seconds 8. Be Back Soon, Laughing To Self, 2021, digital animation, 18 seconds 9. See You Later, Rolling My Eyes, 2021, digital animation, 20 seconds