"Something in Everything" by Peter Madden

As Christmas Break was fast approaching, Peter Madden came to the Circle as the 2010 Mudge Fellow with strings, staples, stickers, and scraps. "Something in Everything;" his exhibit at the Christopher Brodigan Gallery is an interactive, site-specific installation of prints, books and collections inspired by and fashioned from the detritus of everyday life. Mr. Madden has been collaborating with Groton School art students whose contributions are also on display in the show.

Artist’s Statement
My work is an ongoing, visual journal of everyday reflections, musings, obsessions and memories. I don’t really see myself as an artist, but more as a diarist, inventor, biographer, exhibitionist, archivist, narrator, antenna. Much of the content of my projects evolves from a desire to relate stories: histories, memories, dreams and biographies. I tell these on a small scale appropriate to the intimate subject matter and the detail of the work. Even my larger constructions are composed of several smaller, individual components. I work with the least promising materials: rusted metal, brown paper bags, rubbings, weathered wood, ash, old flowers.

 

 

I’ve found that common place materials with a past life enrich my work with the mysteries they inherently carry. I enjoy the challenge of taking what we see everyday and reorganizing, transforming, and re-presenting it in a new light, in a manner that poetically charges it. I often use the book format because it allows me to incorporate my interests in collage/assemblage, writing, photography and moving pictures. Generated by a desire to reminisce, teach, preserve and collect, most of my books fall into one of three basic categories: biographies, travel logs and scrap books. For me they are a means of expressing admiration and postponing loss, whether of places, events or individuals.

The Brodigan Exhibit "Something in Everything" will run from January 6, to February 26, 2011