PECK’S ‘PROPHECIES & PLATITUDES’
FAIL TO TRANSCEND
By Roberta Soltea
SAN FRANCISCO –- Like a Midwestern hippie’s attempt at ‘earth shoes,’ Kansas artist Monica Jane Peck’s latest art-trocities ‘Prophecies & Platitudes’ hit the ground paint-fully hard, heels first.
Large canvases imitating late-modernist to early post-modernist 20th-century American artists (think Miro, Mothership, Featherbird) alternate with text paintings offering chestnut-esque advice.
One is not sure what to think, nor what to do. Lucky for one, this show is in a bar with a jukebox, so one can always put a dime in (or fifty) and choose a song to accompany one’s musings on this rather pathetic yet strangely intriguing bit of contemporary miscellanea.
Perhaps Peck, having failed to achieve technical mastery of the medium (acrylic), seeks to use text as a distraction. There is always something oddly pleasing about hand-painted letters.
Hanging miraculously for the entire month of September (yawn), you might as well peek in for a bit to see these things.
Hummingbird Prophecy: For the nectar. Acrylic on Canvas, 3’x5.’
A Peck, after all, is sometimes just a Peck, but still a Peck is never anything less than a Peck. And so if her art has failed to be anything other than her art, then it is succeeding at being itself, just as you and I, dear reader, cannot walk on water, yet we can walk on sand and dirt and presumably (whilst wearing appropriate apparatus) we might also walk on the moon.
‘Prophecies & Platitudes’
Thieves Tavern
496 14th St./Guerrero
San Francisco, 94110
Reception:
Thursday, September 9th
