Peter Siskos

Lives and works in NYC, NY

Artist statement

For a long time I felt a shift before I knew what to do with it: a change in the texture of time itself. Attention moves differently now. A moment no longer settles before the next one arrives. I grew up in an analog world. I am raising a child in an algorithmic one. My work comes out of the distance between the two. I work across moving image, photography, sound, and installation, using repetition and interruption to examine what systems do to the body, whether those systems are mechanical, technological, or historical. Field Readings is an ongoing series. In Field Readings I, rotary telephones, improvised percussion, electrical hum, photographic lightboxes, and two-channel moving image move from order toward overload. The work asks what happens to perception at the threshold of technological rupture, and what stays in the body when systems move faster than it can feel or follow. Come Out (study) turns the same tools toward a different system: the history that shapes how a body is seen. Set against Steve Reich’s Come Out, built from Daniel Hamm’s testimony of police violence, a fragmented portrait repeats until looking turns into scrutiny and recognition into classification. What connects the two works is the felt contrast between different systems of time and visibility. It is not nostalgia for an analog past. It is attention to what those systems do to perception and to the body.

Artwork