Emily Peacock: die laughing ft. Essay by Natalie Zelt, PhD

Work by Emily Peacock Essay by Natalie Zelt, Ph.D.

John M. O’Quinn Gallery Lawndale Art & Performance Center September 18, 2021 - February 5, 2022

Aren’t You Glad I Didn’t Say ‘Bananas’?: New Artwork by Emily Peacock An essay by Natalie Zelt No. No, that’s not a joke. That’s real. - Emily Peacock For more than 15 years, Emily Peacock has walked a path well worn by loud Texas women.

Famous drawling folks like Molly Ivins, Ann Richards, or Brené Brown have taken the access afforded them to speak on difficult issues regarding family, gender, mental health, and class disparities. As an artist, Peacock uses her work to point out related tough incongruities— thresholds where reality and the absurd meet. Peacock’s artwork—which has grown across media to include photography, film, painting, performance, sculpture, and installation—elicits a kind of formative discomfort from many of her viewers that is akin to the atmosphere in a crowded room moments after that loud lady in the back asked a question—that question that is a bit too much about the taboo realities of living in this world—but is what some of us are conditioned to avoid thinking about ourselves. Peacock’s artwork is a formal experiment in naming difficult and dissonant experiences using playful aesthetics rooted in the contemporary culture and the histories of art. die laughing showcases her use of humor and juxtaposition asa mechanisms for critique as well as a means of recognizing often invisible but pervasive discrepancies in everyday life. die laughing marks the accumulation of recent experiences and changing realities many of us try not to think about, particularly the precarity of mental health, sense of self, and bodies.

About a month into the pandemic, Peacock published an essay about the creative flourishing she encountered during lockdown and how it bolstered her identity as an artist. Filled with the kind of hopeful potential that can be garnered in chaos and uncertainty she declared, “I have never been more confident than I have this last week that I am meant to be an artist.”1 People in the comments called her an inspiration and applauded her talent and resolve.

Twelve weeks later she published another essay recounting her subsequent admittance to a mental rehabilitation facility after attempted self-harm. The essay begins, “I am a fraud.

A phony baloney.”2 Her sense of self and the sense of herself as an artist was shaken. This public writing about her private struggles and feelings of failure in caring for herself, her mental health, her art, and her family illustrate the ways Peacock’s artwork is rooted in feminist concerns but also that her art making is at once declarative and responsive. It sparks conversation and changes as the conversation moves. It is assertive but open.

Peacock’s artwork brings hard topics into the gallery using materials and references from everyday life. Increase the Contrast (2020), for example, is inspired by Peacock’s changing identities as an artist, parent, and partner. The pink plexi is a massive photo filter used to increase existing visible contrast—referencing Peacock’s training as a photographer and her social identification with the tight-knit photo community in Houston.3 The filter is labelled with “3 ½,” the age of her son during the beginning of the pandemic. Two lawn chairs— necessary furniture in Houston, particularly during lockdown—lean on either side of the glass, hugging it. One chair is trapped against the wall and the other shares open space with the gallery. Folded up as if ready to be carried away, ready to move, their contrasting plaids are heightened through the glass, as raising a child during the pandemic led to irreconcilable

contrast between Peacock and her partner. The meaning of the video installation Fast Burning Type (2021) similarly acts as a declaration that remains open to the interpretation of the room. Two screens suspended from the ceiling face opposite directions, like a joke left hanging in the air. The video features looped imagery and the sound of a miniature tire swing on fire. The video intersects in multiple ways with spatial, visual, and auditory dynamics of the gallery space in ways that heighten the eerily missing smell of burning rubber. Suspended above a painstaking installation featuring “every rock my son has ever handed me” and a pile of nylon fibers, Fast Burning Type speaks to the stark chaos of living through a pandemic in Texas in the wake of Trump while also holding the slippery ground of being a parent.

The tender discord of mothering and making art is evident in whimsical patterns and absurdist body play in the photograph die laughing (2020). Peacock’s facial expression recalls what Rozsika Parker termed “maternal ambivalence” or the fleeting feelings of hatred that exist alongside motherly love.4 In this photograph, Peacock physically embodies portions of her son in ways that prevent her from speaking but not from showing up. The patterns and colors along with her child’s smile at the bottom of the frame are incongruent with Peacock’s wan expression and the firm grip of her hands. Sweat Stain Glass (2021) along with Helluva Performa (2021) and Funny Bone: I Don’t Feel ‘Til It Hurts (2021) form a triad of textural juxtaposition, bodily needs, the demands of caregiving, and drive for artmaking in constrained chaos. The photograph of Peacock’s son in Helluva Performa formally resonates with traditions of classical Western portraiture. The child’s forceful costuming alongside their delicate curls and softly resting hand dodges gender normative posing, as does the Silly Putty base, a structural support that literally melts and moves with the weight of the photographic representation. Funny Bone: I Don’t Feel ‘Til It Hurts features a cast of Peacock’s right elbow on a blue velvet pedestal. It is the artist’s literal imprint in the gallery. The sculpture figures the distinctive buzzing pain that occurs when elbows collide with immovable surfaces. Sweat Stain Glass is Peacock’s “portrait of the pandemic,” each pane bringing together everyday objects, tools, and family members. The colorful background is reminiscent of decor of transient gathering spaces like skating rinks, lobbies, or airports that morphed into pandemic danger zones.

The unsettling transformation of public space and movement that occurred with the onset of the pandemic is reflected in Tin Poetic Airplanes (2021). The images of planes pictured on the mirrored surfaces of these nine wet collodion tintypes are nearly impossible to discern. Photographs of planes have harbored a particular symbolism of tragedy and potential harm, especially since the morning of September 11, 2001.

But in taking on the challenge of picturing metal on metal, Peacock showcases her focus on technique and craft at moments of profound uncertainty. Each artwork in die laughing is created according to its conceptual needs—the questions it asks and the issues it raises. Tin Poetic Airplanes literally and metaphorically reflects Peacock’s

engagement with a wide range of materials and techniques as well as the enduring impact of photography on her artistic production. She continues to grapple with the medium even as her compositional strategies branch beyond its traditional bounds.

Relentless & Bananas (2021) is likewise boundary pushing. The series of four Polaroids— three self-portraits, one of bananas—demonstrate the ways Peacock uses vulnerability and distancing as an artistic tool. The structure of the knock-knock joke and the immediacy of Polaroid lend an ephemerality to photographs that feature Peacock wearing the cap necessary for the transmagnetic stimulation she underwent as treatment for her mental health. Installed around a four-sided column, the viewer must become unsettled and move their body to follow the joke. Glammed up for the camera, Peacock’s posing is reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s drag Polaroids. Relentless & Bananas is therefore interactive, performative, while at once about intensely intimate revelations of self-care. Peacock’s critique of the enduring stigmatization of mental health and the unease it carries is bolstered by her choice to cite

Relentless, Not Enough, and Worthy: The artist Hannah Wilke died in Twelve Oaks Hospital, about a 90-minute drive from where a nine-year-old Emily Peacock was headed back to school after winter holidays. Like Peacock, Wilke was expansive in her use of media—using photography, performance, sculpture, and film—as well as her manipulation of humor to critique cultural attachment to perfection and gender norms. Wilke’s work is aesthetically complex, biting, and wrapped up in the social history of power, representation, gender, race, and class in the art world. Wilke’s art received much due attention after her death, still not enough has been written about it. In die laughing, each artwork delivers its own leveled critique—or “fuck it”—via avenues of humor and playful aesthetics concerned with social meaning. Together, die laughing reflects the many relentless ways that the artist’s experience and her formal experiments, jokes and death, laughter and discomfort, and imperfection and declaration go hand-in-hand. And like Wilke’s, not enough has been written about the contextual and aesthetic complexities of Peacock’s art. That is an uncomfortable truth, worthy of more. ¹ Peacock, “I cannot stop creating things.” Glasstire (6 April 2020) https://glasstire.com/2020/04/06/i-cannot-stop-creating-things/ (Accessed 25 October 2021). ² Peacock, “That Wasn’t the Whole Story,” Glasstire (6 July 2020) https://glasstire.com/2020/07/06/that-wasnt-the-whole-story/ (Accessed 25 October 2021). ³ Peacock’s consciousness of the weight of her social identification as a photographer is also apparent in Fervor, 2021, a supersized marble photo mat. ⁴ Rozsika Parker, Mother Love/Mother Hate: The Power of Maternal Ambivalence (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

Index Works listed in order of appearance in catalogue Emily Peacock, My Very Own OOF (2021). Spray paint on canvas, 86 x 96” Emily Peacock, Sweat Stain Glass (2021). Archival inkjet print mounted to aluminum, 42 x 28” Emily Peacock, die laughing (2020). Archival inkjet print, 8 x 12” Emily Peacock, Installation view of Fast Burning Type (2021). Double-sided video (looped), “every rock my son has ever handed me”, and nylon fibers; Dimensions variable Emily Peacock, Increase the Contrast (2020). Plexiglass, vinyl, & two lawn chairs, 48 x 46” Emily Peacock, Installation view of Worthy of Repetition (2021). Embossed ribbon, Dimensions variable

die laughing is dedicated to Peacock’s gone but not forgotten friends Michael Galbreath, Paula Newton, and Clint Willour.

Mission Lawndale is a multidisciplinary contemporary art center that engages Houston communities with exhibitions and programs that explore the aesthetic, critical, and social issues of our time.

Supporters Lawndale’s exhibitions and programs are produced with generous support from The Anchorage Foundation of Texas; The Brown Foundation, Inc.; David R. Graham; The Joan Hohlt and Roger Wich Foundation; The John M. O’Quinn Foundation; The John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation; Houston Endowment; Humanities Texas and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as part of the federal ARP Act; Kathrine G. McGovern/The John P. McGovern Foundation; The National Endowment for the Arts; The Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation; The Rose Family Foundation; the Texas Commission on the Arts; The City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance; and The Wortham Foundation, Inc. Additional support provided by Lindsey Schechter/Houston Dairymaids, Saint Arnold Brewing Company, and Topo Chico.