peyton chiang
SOEEPY
the world around me is so serious - it's silly.
When I was young, I was diagnosed with Auditory Processing Disorder, a condition that made it difficult to process and interpret sounds, impacting my capacity to learn languages and my overall memory. My childhood inability to understand and use language predisposed me to romanticize the tactile and permanent forms around me and introduced a notion of linguistic instability that continues to inform my work and thinking today. My work speaks to my feelings of irresponsibility and complacency toward my physically constructed surroundings. It is all too easy to abstract a derelict house without considering the unbalanced system that allows a property to remain vacant in a housing crisis, or to be awed by a plaza that compromises drainage in a waterlogged city. I work to develop deeper relationships with the mundane or neglected objects around me, to uncover their contexts, biases, or implications.
As I navigate the structures, environments, and systems of the world, I discover curious situations in which there is more than meets the eyes. I gently, ephemerally intervene in the these situations with paper, wood, plastics, and fabrics. I craft captions or edits - physical words floating in a puddle, glued to a door, or soaked into concrete - which complicate, critique, or emphasize the conditions of their environment. I photograph the interventions before they fade, scatter, or are removed, not as an act of sublimation, but as an attempt to capture one moment of their changeable existence. I am a witness to the concepts, spaces, and objects I help to speak, emote, or move.
it's so silly - I"m serious about the world.
