By Kirsten Cave
February 2023
Madeline Peckenpaugh: Detours is a book of select photographs taken by Madeline Peckenpaugh between 2014-2022. This book was published on the occasion of the gallery’s exhibition, Madeline Peckenpaugh: Farsight (April 12-May 17, 2023) and features an essay by Associate Director Kirsten Cave. The following essay appears in this book.
Traversing cities and mountains, the photographs in this book span broad distances, compiled from places Madeline Peckenpaugh has lived, worked, and traveled between 2014-2022. As she navigates the world, her journeys are interrupted with unexpected configurations that sing in an organized system from the perfect viewpoint. She backtracks to honor these opportune arrangements through a photograph on her iPhone. With an adventurous spirit, a flexibility for change, a sense of humor, and a longing for finding spontaneous order amidst disarray, Peckepaugh’s work celebrates active looking.
An affinity for order is the motivating factor behind Peckenpaugh’s photography. Stumbling upon simplicity and organization provides Peckenpaugh with comfort. These moments are not staged nor ever edited: they are arrangements produced by nature, human activities, and/or chance. The artist’s photography reveals her ability to produce compositions that confuse and frustrate a straightforward reading, as her carefully chosen cropping sometimes obscures her subjects.
Within the formal qualities of Peckenpaugh’s artistic practice, strong through lines bind her photography and her painting, making separating them infeasible. As her palette is inspired by the unaltered natural world, the colors of ice, snow, trees, dried grasses, flowers, and leaves transcend her media, as does her captivation with competing textures. She employs interwoven forms, lines, and shapes that dance around the composition and recede in space like rhythmic beats. Often, Peckenpaugh engages bodies of water, trees, and branches as framing devices, and in her photographs, fences also become common framing devices.
In the artist’s photographs, there is a push and pull between urban environments and the natural world that is less evident in her paintings—likely a direct result of her living and working in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and New York City. Is that fog, clouds, or steam? Tarps may appear to mimic or perform as liquid or mountains. In some cases, billboards, signs, and tops of buildings erupt upwards; in others, these ascending shapes may be trees, flowers, or dried grasses.
At the core of Peckenpaugh’s process is a desire for the indeterminate landscapes that arise from spontaneity. Not merely moving from point A to point B, Peckenpaugh keeps the edges of her journey open, allowing space for moments of surprising connections, finding delight in the detours.
Installation view of Madeline Peckenpaugh: Farsight (April 12-May 17, 2023) at Alexander Berggruen, New York, NY. Photo: Philipp Hoffmann
