I’m deep in preparation for my upcoming solo show at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland. The show is called “Traps, Flows, Echoes” and it opens Nov 6th, running until Nov 28th. There’s an opening reception Thursday Nov. 6 in Gallery 214 in the PNCA main campus, 1241 NW Johnson St. in Portland. Here’s the text I wrote for the flyer-
Portland artist Roger Peet will open a show of new installation, video and print work in Gallery 214 at PNCA on the 6th November. The show, entitled “Traps, Flows, Echoes” focuses on the idea of the trap, in both the physical and cultural realms. Much of the show will focus on Peet’s relationship to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he has worked for several seasons to promote community conservation through art. Some of the work addresses Peet’s complex relationship with his father, who faked his death to go AWOL from the British Air Force and to fly helicopters for the CIA’s interventions in Congo in the 1960’s, an event which Peet recreates in a video collaboration with Portland director Jodi Darby. In his travels and work in Congo, Peet experienced first hand the disastrous consequences of the history his father had helped to shape, and this show will contain vivid and evocative print, installation, and sound pieces that evoke the trauma and brutality of that trap of history, as well as the ways that he and the friends that he made in Congo are trying to get out of it. The work also features sound collages and poetry by Portland MC Mic Crenshaw.
For more information about my work in Congo, see this blog. You can read interviews and an article about that work here on Mongabay, and here at the Oregonian.