Click here to see Peter Garfield's work for the Project Space.

Brooklyn-based artist Peter Garfield works in video, photography and installation to make riddles where layers of what we thought was reality peel off one by one, and we're made awkwardly aware of our political projections onto the field of vision. For the Project Space, Garfield presents images of his painterly piles of seasonally colour-coded trash.

artreview.com: These images evoke the seasons, but have very specific titles: Look no incisions!, Contiene Jugo, Alfred E. Newman's Clean Sweep and You are so unaware. Can you talk about this naming system?

Peter Garfield: The recent show at Pierogi was a way for me to give a somewhat humorous or at least irreverent context for a small group of images of colour-coded trash. I didn't want the reference to the seasons to be too overbearing. It was also much more entertaining for me, and I hope for the audience as well, to find the titles within the pictures.

artreview.com: Should we be busy getting friendly with garbage, accepting it as part of nature? (Are we already?)

Peter Garfield: Yes, definitely (to both). It's been a fact of human existence for millenia, but of course it's different now in that we have so little space left to fill with our junk. I'm always fascinated when I fly over the aircraft graveyards in the desert south-west of the U.S. I'd love to do a monumental earth-works-type installation of colour-coded garbage out there, maybe some Kenneth Noland-style stripes stretching all the way from West Texas to the San Bernardino Mountains in California. It would put the Grand Canyon to shame!

artreview.com: Can you talk about assembling these pieces – the colours look extremely carefully chosen, each fleck, with the same care as if it was a painting.

Peter Garfield: Yes, I spend quite a bit of time on them. At first I just dump a few large bags of trash that I've collected onto the floor of my studio and kick it around for awhile. It starts to make some sort of visual sense as I play with it. I take things out, add other things. All during the process, I photograph the mess to get some distance from it, to better evaluate it. At a certain point, out of satisfaction with the quality of the arrangement or out of embarrassment at the absurdly obsessive waste of time (or out of boredom or sheer disgust) I decide to set up the 8x10 camera and capture it.

artreview.com: You've been interested in the generation of illusion since your Mobile Homes project (1995), in which you appear to drop prefab houses from the sky but in fact dangled models in front of the camera. What motivates your work with illusion and trompe l'oiel?

Peter Garfield: It's to try to represent the pursuit of meaning in an ever-mutating environment (interior as well as exterior).

artreview.com: Are you more interested in shattering the dreams we inhabit or travelling deeper into them? Your work seems to pull both ways.

Peter Garfield: Both to an equal degree, really. In my own experience, the fewer illusions I have, the better life is. Illusions can be entertaining, but they too often obstruct or obscure my ability to experience things more immediately, and they colour my judgement. On a larger, societal scale they lead to lots of misery. Marketers of everything from public policy to under-arm deodorant perpetrate and perpetuate and manipulate the garbage they bring to us, and we willingly submit to it. So I guess the misanthrope in me revels in shattering dreams, while the more balanced, humanist in me strives to delve deeper, to reach a better understanding.

artreview.com: Your practice has this feeling of stretching beyond contemporary art. It has the sensibilities of film, politics and media – visual activism, we might call it. What are your thoughts on this?

Peter Garfield: I'm happy to hear you frame my work in that way. Although I don't consider myself an activist in any way (I'm too ambivalent), I do often feel unnaturally bound by the artworld's trends and concerns. My work emerges out of my interest in human psychology, how that's manifested in uses and abuses of power, and how one can trace that in larger movements through human history.


artreview.com: You described your video Deep Space 1 as 'a query about the nature of free will' – is it that there is always someone or something pulling the strings of our perception? How do you feel about having that responsibility?

Peter Garfield: It's difficult to get to the bottom of what, fundamentally, motivates us in a given situation. Deep Space 1 is an attempt to approximate, through a visually and a aurally fabricated environment, the enigma of perception, or the experience of existing. I wonder how much of who we are is a projection of anything from ancient archetypes to current media stars. We're all being pulled by strings and pulling them for others as well. I'm just trying to evoke and mirror some of what it is I perceive to be a constant of human existence.

artreview.com: Your work isn't just about engineering reality, but our own projections of what is 'correct', expected, and acceptable. For example, in the 'documentary' photos of the team supposedly behind the house-dropping project, there was a perfect politically correct racial mix of participants. And in Objects with Potential you tap into key liberal fears about anonymous military-industrial power. Can you talk about this projection of morality and meaning onto what's in front of our eyes?

Peter Garfield: To project one's own values onto others seems presumptuous (although I do it all the time). I try to take myself seriously enough to survive, to do my work, to be a 'productive and constructive participant in society', but when I take a step back, it's hard to take anything all that seriously. It's all pretty ludicrous, so I don't really know anything about the meaning. I think that's why I find myself an artist – it allows me to pursue a pastime that doesn't need to be justified in any way.