Samuel Peck

Samuel holds a BFA in Printmaking and Drawing from the University of Rhode Island, and an MFA in Printmaking and Drawing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Sam is currently a Phd Candidate in Art Education at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities.

Artist Statement

My work is concerned with an artist-educator-researcher practice based in notions of relationships, experience, and memory.  Painting, Prints, Installation and Visual Journals have become central to my practice. These compose my post-studio practice of derive, where a Plein-air painter would take themselves out into the world and document the world around them. I use these practices as a place and space to move through the earth to comprehend and understand my inner play in step with but distinct from the situationist. The documentary artifact whether truth or fiction suggests an artifact in game related through shared background experience; objects collected and constructed in living in the accumulation of documentary material, its uses, and its hierarchies of value. Such as twenty-year-old t-shirts (found object), drawings on boarding passes from locations long forgotten, Notes for kids to classes (writing), paintings on newspaper, collage from available texts or installation in unused spaces, or the performance in preparing food for a potluck dinner or game of softball.

Like Candy Jernigan, the everyday inhabits my work in grocery lists, morning doodles, treasured concert stubs, bottle caps, stickers from friends, to-do lists of crap I didn't quite accomplish, and receipts from the junk of where and when I spent money. These all are composed in and relate to the portrayal of the accumulation of lived experience. This documentation that references moments, memories and play of life assembled as an exquisite corpse through and in the work.

Visual Journals

Drawings

Want to know more about Sam and his work as an artist, researcher, and educator? You can check out his Curriculum Vitae.