END TIMES [notes]
Lucas Peel’s End Times explores the visual language of millennial memory through the lens of technology, nostalgia, and doomerism. Utilizing material and processes from his career in demolition, Peel creates multimedia collages that feel both out-of-context and uncannily familiar.
In his debut solo show, Peel's large scale works combines a dense materiality, bright and demanding aesthetic, and haunting nuance that challenges the viewer to spend more time thinking about what we will leave behind.
Throughout End Times, there is an emphasis on materiality: the physical accumulation of matter on/in space, like detritus or sedimentary buildup; hyper-curated narratives interweaving technological interfaces with pop culture characters, advertising language, and memes; and the weathering of these material layers through obscurification, censorship, and removal.
Peel’s meticulous layering process involves a combination of inkjet media transfers, graffiti tagging and buffing, wheatpasting of print matter (such as self-designed posters, found photography and advertisement from vintage magazines), and direct painting/illustration via traditional means. The resulting compositions are text heavy, alluding to the artist’s poetry background, moodboard-like assemblages that live somewhere between distant memory and AI-fueled nightmare.
The pieces’ backgrounds are inspired by urban geology, the sedimentary accumulation of layers or physical detritus on the cityscape. The relational aspect of tags, buffs, wheatpaste advertising and guerrilla marketing, latrinalia on vertical public space. This inevitable accumulation forms a sort of context underlying the more recognizable imagery.
The windows 95 iconography represents a home screen, the nostalgia or baseline we keep coming back to. Both optimistic in its memory and on settling in.
The image transfers are film photos taken during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. Signs of life. Banal features of vacancy in public space, the erosion of normalcy in the face of catastrophe. The remnants and voids left behind.
The pop-culture, icons, action figures, Pokémon, brand icons further speak to the nostalgia and recognition of imagery within the context of a larger consumerist picture.
They are noisy and disruptive but also familiar and comforting.
The wheatpaste media is composed of digitally altered advertising— newspaper spreads superimposed with poetry, coupon books, and posters — physically applied in collage-like assemblages onto the canvas.