To Me, To You

To Me, To You was a new commission for the largest exhibition space in BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle. Using the scale of the gallery space to produce a life-size cartoon narrative of the production of art, Peter performs an act of detournement on both the public’s supposed difficulties in understanding contemporary art and the relation of high art to mass media cartoon. The title embodies this: as being both a mass media comedy catchphrase and a signification of free exchange.

The project is a meta-narrative comprising one-to-one scale environments, people and objects. The installation takes the viewer through the processes of commissioning, making and exhibiting an artwork. The journey begins with an office space before moving into consecutive studios where an artist creates a new abstract sculpture. Two art handlers arrive to collect it and so begins a farcical journey to move it to its final destination – an unfamiliar version of BALTIC in a semi-derelict high street. The sculpture featured in this exhibition is an affectionate nod to the way abstract modern sculpture is sometimes co-opted to represent the incomprehensibility of art in editorial illustrations.

By exposing last minute decisions being undertaken in a studio, the significance and authorship of the finished sculpture is playfully undermined.

The exhibition had 84,521 visitors. The interview film with Peter, ‘BALTIC Bites’, had a total of 715 total plays (combined total from YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, BALTIC+). On the BALTIC website there were 3,943 page views for related project pages. Featured in The Weeks Top Exhibitions in a-n (12 August 2019) and reviewed in Art Review(October 2019).