About the Exhibition
“After being approached to create a drawing for glass bathroom walls and partitions, my mind kept going back to the notion of hiding,” says Anne Peabody. “The prospect of being seen by others while enclosed in a traditionally sacred and concealed place offers 21c patrons a novel experience. In this space, spectators become participants in the artwork, rather than simply observers, and may adjust their actions accordingly. A word search for ‘hiding’ yielded hundreds of images of trees with both people and animals hiding behind them.”
In Hide and Seek, the forest is made up of large, digitally rendered trees, which grow more and more transparent as they recede. The darker trees in the foreground create areas in which people can hide completely from the outside world, while the more transparent background trees and foggy areas transform him or her from a viewer into an object being viewed. This boundary is constantly crossed as patrons walk through the space, passing by and through trees of varying opacities. The aluminum-on-glass printing process adds another dimension to the perception of privacy within the space. The darker, more opaque trees read as mirrors. The participant can effectively hide from the outside world while behind them, but in so doing is reflected most clearly within the room.
About the artist
Anne Peabody is a Brooklyn-based sculptor who earned her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Based in Brooklyn, Peabody’s works have been featured in exhibitions in the US and Europe, including “Glasstress,” organized in conjunction with the Venice Biennale in 2009 and 2011. Peabody was recently named one of the top fifty contemporary glass artists in the last fifty years by Glass Quarterly magazine. Architect Peter Marino has commissioned several site-specific installations by Peabody.
