Quinn Peck
Two Time Art Party Participant
The Tunnel
Artist’s Website
No Website
Artist’s Statement
My photo-based work is a continually evolving conversation on self and identity, involving representations of subconscious impulses, desires, and expressions. This work comes from a series titled: Liminality: Self-reflection from the space in-between. It was created in 2009, some three years before I began to transition from female to male.
In retrospect this series is my reckoning with being assigned female at birth and being rigidly socialized as feminine, though I could not have told you that in 2009. I was raised in an environment where everything around me supported and enforced a strict binary idea of gender, which had tremendous impact on my development. In these images I play and interact with different selves, enacting characters I never fully identified with through self-portraiture. For me this work conjures themes of vulnerability, the feminine, transitory states, dreams, death and rebirth.
The figure in the images is often blurred in motion, sometimes sharp at rest. This variation in the solidity of my physical form references a transitional state, and describes the alternately slippery and then seemingly fixed nature of identity. My photographs reflect the tumultuous mixture of emotions that seem closer to the surface in such moments of restlessness. When I photograph myself in a space, I think and move intuitively according to the emotions brought up in response to that place, in that current moment, knowing that it will never be replicated.
About the Artist
Quinn is a multi-media visual artist, born in 1983 in San Luis Obispo, California. He completed his undergraduate degree in Visual Art (emphasis in photography) at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2005. He then earned a Masters in Photography from the Academy of Art University, in 2009, during which time he created the work shown here.
For the past nearly seven years, he has been pursuing his multiple passions, and trying to find a way to continue living in the increasingly challenging climate of the Bay Area. He earned an MA in Counseling Psychology, Expressive Arts Therapy, from the California Institute of Integral Studies in 2014, and has spent the past couple years serving the LGBTQ community as a Marriage and Family Therapist Intern in a private practice setting. Quinn also aspires to become a Master Gardener, and is currently working towards a certificate in Permaculture Design at Merritt College. He dreams of creating a permaculture farm offering holistic mental health services to queer and trans* folks and their allies. He is working on carving out more time to return to making art. He resides in Oakland, California.
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