Exposed Interiors
An intervention by artist Gord Peteran
Campbell House Museum
160 Queen St. W.
April 1 to May 29, 2022
Tuesday to Friday: 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Saturdays: 12 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.
With support from Campbell House, Ontario Arts Council and the City of Toronto.
Exhibition Description
Through a series of site interventions within the historic and antique-furnished spaces of Campbell House Museum, Peteran’s reinvented fitments of the home help us exhume the myriad of subliminal narratives and encoded messages the past has to offer, hovering like ghosts hidden, in plain sight.
Artist Statement
My artwork is fueled by history. While this is not uncommon among artists, I specifically target the historical decorative arts, and the idea that furnishing is a primal inclination that maps our psychology more than it coddles the body. Our obsessions are in our possessions, always have been, always will be.
As we currently probe the past for answers to our sometimes sordid behaviour, I believe that just below the surface of historical glamour, design and craftsmanship are darker truths – and brighter truths – still at work, still operating on us now, still forging and foraging the political, cultural and personal future we require.
I’m chasing that.
The past can still prod and nag us...if we let it.
About Gord Peteran
Artist Gord Peteran’s boundary-crossing approach brings a fresh perspective on furniture, sculpture and the human condition. Peteran has completed hundreds of private, corporate, and public commissions and has lectured and exhibited extensively throughout North America.
Peteran retired this year after teaching at OCAD U in the Faculty of Art and Faculty of Design for over 30 years. He also taught at the California College of the Arts, Sheridan College and the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.
His work is held in many public and private collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Milwaukee Art Museum in Wisconsin, Royal Ontario Museum, and Art Museum at the University of Toronto.