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Scott Peterman at Daniel Silverstein - New York
Art in America, Jan, 2003 by Melissa Kuntz
The sparse Maine landscapes in Scott Peterman's color photographs of ice-fishing shacks are static and silent, effectively conveying the experience of being alone in a vast and empty vista. These images are visceral and beautiful, but the photographs, all from 2002, are also attentive to the esthetic properties of the fisherman's abodes. As Peterman has said in an artist's statement, the shacks "are entirely utilitarian in their purpose, yet put together in surprisingly ingenious ways, appearing as crude minimalist sculpture."
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Peterman's work falls within a photographic genre that aims to catalogue the variations of architectural structures as examples of minimalist form or serial logic. Like Dan Graham's Homes for America, Peterman's photographs take a single form, in this case a shedlike structure, and record the variations in "decoration" of the form. The influence of Ed Ruscha's Every Building on the Sunset Strip is also evident; both artists take as a starting point a conceptual project of recording the variations in a given architectural form, and also aim to catalogue the occurrences of the buildings in a given landscape or location. However, Peterman's photographs deviate from their conceptual predecessors: they are concerned with beauty, evident in Peterman's choice of scenery and light conditions, and the flawless way in which the photographs are composed and printed.
Each of these 30-by-38 1/2-inch photographs is titled after the body of water or nearest town where they were taken. In Frye's Leap, the white and light gray hut is backed by an all-white landscape, so snowy and bleak that the horizon line is barely discernible. Small windows on the front and back of the shack are aligned so that the misty scenery behind it is visible through the building. Third Roach Pond depicts a gray and turquoise shack against a light ground. There is, again, only a hint of horizon. The cool, California aqua of the roof, coupled with the warm, smoky walls, white window and small red and yellow reflectors, seems like a perfectly planned abstract painting.
Naples, a white and gray gridded structure in a setting of snow and ice, is reminiscent of a chilly Sol LeWitt sculpture. Similarly, an all-white building on an all-white ground, Trickey Lake, brings to mind Kazimir Malevich's White on White. In Kent's Landing, an ultramarine blue tarpaulin stretched over a wooden support evokes Yves Klein. Dry Mills, the only "expressionist" ice hut, breaks the minimalist mode: it is decorated with daubs and dashes of brown and taupe along with active green brushstrokes.
The formalist serendipity Peterman discovers in these fishing shacks is a virtual crash course in postwar American art history set in a backdrop of romantic landscapes.
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