Interview by Celia Goodman

Acrylic get transfer prints by Barrett Peck

A senior at the American University of Paris, Barrett Peck recently exhibited his artwork for the first time at the 1909 Bookstore pop-up in the 3537 space in Paris. This interview was done on the occasion of this exhibition, which took place from October 11-17. A zine of the artworks exhibited is upcoming.

Celia Goodman: Can you describe the work you made? 

Barrett Peck: I displayed 25 acrylic photo transfers, and they’re photos I took over the last month or so. They’re divided into three categories: firstly of empty architectural photos, the second category are these freaky self-portraits taken in my apartment. The final are these abstracted, often out of focus photos that I sometimes took of images on the computer screen. 

CG: Were they taken mostly with a film camera? 

BP: They were taken entirely on film. They were all in black & white, and I had to really up the contrast. Because I’m transferring the photos onto prepared watercolor paper, you need the photos to be so high contrast to actually translate. 

Celia: They don’t look overly contrasted. 

Barrett: Yeah, because there’s a lot of noise from the paper, when the actual transfer occurs. It’s intentional, because you can rub off the entirety of the paper if you so choose, but I chose to keep a lot of the visual noise in, so that I would create these kinds of ghost images. I had an imagined reality for myself.  

My intention was I didn’t want to make some kind of photo-show with just printed photographs and hang them on the wall, because I’m not interested in making - at this moment at least - reproducible objects. In transferring them and keeping in this visual noise I’m making an object that isn’t industrial and reproducible like a photograph, I’m making it unique because it becomes this object that can’t possibly be reproduced. I translate the way I’m seeing the world in a mystical and enigmatic way, because I get so depressed by the loss of mystery in the world. I think that’s one of the preoccupations of my life. I want to be able to make art that takes things I saw and adds a degree of mystery once again, or mysticism. I think I’m pretty into having an imaginative view of the world separate from senses or separate from science or separate from anything like that because it’s not as fun to experience the world that way. It doesn’t have to do with whether or not I believe any of this stuff, it’s just my preferred way of experiencing the world. 

CG: I feel the same. Manipulating photographs is a great - at least in my experience - way of doing that. You’re taking an exact representation of the world and then you’re distorting it in some way, which I think is a really effective way of creating that mysticism. 

BP: Yeah. Often I find that things that are close to the world but slightly off are the most effective way of manipulating someone’s view of the world rather than creating a totally alternate reality.  

CG: That’s how I feel about something like CGI, if you’re creating something that’s too believable, it loses its mysticism. 

BP: Yeah - if something is slightly off from the actual thing that it is, like a very fantastical surrealist painting - I mean, I don’t like Salvador Dali, but I find other surrealist artists to be very convincing, often the surrealist photographers specifically. You’re seeing a version of the world that you kind of recognize, and this has to do with fascination with dreams as well because in dreams you really don’t invent landscapes, it comes from your subconscious, things that you’ve seen already. Sometimes things that you’ve never seen but you will see. Sometimes you walk into a room and you realize you’ve seen it in a dream before and you’ve never been in that room. You get this kind of woozy feeling from seeing a version of the world you recognize, but that is not the way you experience the world. I think doing the actual technique of transferring something and making a ghost image, exaggerating shadows, it has a little bit of a cinematic quality - especially in the architectural photos - where it looks like settings for films. I think it intentionally has a dreamlike effect. Some of them I actually reversed so they would just be a reversed set of images, a mirrored set, and those would act as a kind of frame for the whole collection of images. I would put them in orientations that weren’t in the exact orientation that they were in originally, like putting a horizontal set of buildings vertically, and that served as the corner framing. They would be reversed so it would be mirrored and the emphasis was less on the thing that was represented and more on the shadows and the shapes.  

CG: Can you describe the process of photo transferring? It seems like that’s really important to the work as a whole. 

BP: Yeah, I just printed the photos on regular printing paper. I printed a lot of images and then I bought A4 sized watercolor paper and put a couple layers of acrylic gesso on it to give it more of a texture and give it more ground for the image to latch onto. I also used a couple layers of photo transfer gel and waited a few days, then I would get the whole thing wet and rub it off with my hands or with a sponge. It would produce these screwed up versions of the original image, they would have a lot of visual noise. Sometimes parts of it wouldn’t reproduce, so there would be straight up holes in the image, or there would be weird textures that weren’t there before. I bought cheap paint brushes to put on the gesso and the gel so that they would have really obvious brush strokes, and you can actually see the brush strokes of the paintbrushes I used underneath the image, so it would add new textures and in a way that was unpredictable. I feel pretty confident in using a camera, so I don’t feel like a lot of accidents happen in the process of photographing and developing. I think I did exactly what I set out to do in the pictures I was taking, but in the actual process there’s no way to control everything. Letting some other force be a part of making it was much more exciting than just displaying some photos I printed.  

CG: You exhibited the dress that you wore in some of the photos, as well as the shoulder pads you cut out and wore as a sort of headphone set. Why did you choose to do that? 

BP: It was a dress I found on the street, and I’ve taken a lot of sets of photos with it, wearing it. I don’t always end up still in the dress when I finish taking the set of photos. I generally start there. I’ve torn it up, I’ve done a bunch of other things with it, it’s this thing that accompanies me. So all the self portraits were taken in the dress or started in the dress. I feel like it was my little talisman, some kind of object that I had imbued power into, it’s the one I’ve chosen, so I feel like it’s not necessarily to add something visually, but in the way of providing some kind of energy to accompany the actual visual objects that I displayed. I would say it was more for my sake than anyone else’s. It’s very colorful too, so it’s interesting with the black & white photos. It just felt right to put it there, it wasn’t a very technical decision. It just felt right to be next to those things.  

CG: What inspired you to do this project?  

BP: I don’t know, I took the photos without any particular project in mind, but my friend [who owns the 1909 Bookstore] saw a photo transfer I made and gave me the opportunity to display these, so I put together a lot of the photos I had made that I thought could be in conversation with one another. I worked a lot for the two weeks in between, from when my friend gave me this opportunity and from when the actual exhibition was. I was working, trying to be like a machine, just working on these transfers. So I don’t know if there was a particular inspiration for this project in general, besides my own wide net of inspirations that I carry with me.