09.25.26 – 12.19.26
Opening Reception: Friday, September 25, 7-10PM
BICA SCHOOL PROJECT SPACE
CURATED BY: WAVY
Made during and after a period of profound personal change, the paintings in Runoff consider what happens when our structures of self-recognition—and those by which others recognize us—fall apart.
Runoff, which arrives in the wake of storms, serves as both metaphor and medium for formal disintegration and re-emergence in Peaches’s work. Working primarily with oil, their paintings emphasize the muddled colors a wet medium can produce, with backgrounds reminiscent of rainwater patches on pavement or soil. These vague, context-less backgrounds shrink in comparison to the painting’s subjects, often larger-than-life feminine figures in states of heightened emotion, as if the cause of their anguish has dissolved and melted out of frame.
Tears, another metaphorical form of runoff, one which traces new paths down a person’s face after emotional storms, offer a potential link between paintings. Yet tears too are ambiguous. For Peaches, crying is both deeply personal and hypervisible, an involuntary physical response that can be maliciously misinterpreted, particularly in a gendered context. Sans context, the vulnerability of tears can suggest anything from feminized fragility to an attempt at manipulation depending on the viewer. These kinds of judgments often suggest more about the viewer’s intent than the intended subject, but their weight can nevertheless be deeply alienating.
The heart of this work, therefore, is sadness itself as a state of being—one that, like water, resists linearity and predictability; one that can reshape how you move through the world and claim what is yours just as runoff traces new patterns in the earth.
Exhibition text written by Kit Xiong
Peaches is an artist and designer based in Brooklyn, New York. Using oil and airbrush primarily in their paintings, their practice explores loss of innocence, the objectification of the female body, and the ongoing relationship between body, mind, and self. Their broader creative practice extends to creative direction, writing, modeling, and collaborative projects.
Peaches received a BFA in Graphic Design from West Virginia University. Their work has been included in group exhibitions at Greenpoint Gallery and Rebel, presented by the Kollection Foundation, in Brooklyn, as well as With Love, presented by AD Exhibitions in Manhattan.
