Jonathan Peyser

Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA

Artist statement

My formalist abstract sculpture is mostly suggestive, carving out ample space for one to dwell in his or her imagination. It hopes to quietly insist that words don’t accommodate all our perceptions and that we consider the use of new materials, forms, juxtapositions, and emotions when looking. Many of the sculptures here are made with used horse traces. These are the heavy gauge horse harness straps that workhorses use to pull a carriage or a plow. Here the I revalue remnants of leather, cast-offs, by making them into a new type of high-relief drawing. The result of the “drawing” is usually graphic, if not uniquely calligraphic. Why Leather? Much of the artwork that I've created over the last 15 or so years grows out of having discovered a used workhorse collar at a second-hand shop on Canal Street in New York. The collar had long, thick, and worn straps--traces--attached to it. I took the workhorse traces that were attached to the collar and starting tying knots in all sorts of shapes and sizes. I’m not completely sure why. I mounted them to metal squares (in high-relief). I know I liked the way they stood off the face of the metal, and I was attracted to the quality of being able to walk around the pieces 180 degrees; I was engaged by the variations the different points of view provided. I also liked the feeling of working with the leather, its materiality, since it was tough but pliable. The idea that they had run along the length of the animal, while at work, perhaps...

Artwork