Peter Hiers
With this work I explore that uneasy space of contradictory feelings about modern existence, knowing that my pleasures and conveniences of today come at a cost to other life forms and to long-term human survival as well. Since 2000, I have gathered fragments of exploded tires from highways for this body of work in which I challenge this lifestyle, and to share the disturbance I feel when I consider the human trajectory.
I enjoy this material for its flexible qualities, ripped textures and especially for its metaphorical richness. The texture alone is completely alluring, and the material provides a vocabulary that allows me a range of formal and conceptual expression. When gathering the rubber along the highways with traffic speeding past me, the air and ground vibrating as I encounter endless detritus and road-kill, I feel in my whole body the violent tension between contemporary culture and the natural world. The organic flexibility, the wildly ripped textures and unusual qualities of this material allow me to raise questions about alternatives not only to a fossil fuel culture, but about ideological alternatives to the materialist American Dream mythology.
Playing with new possibilities and creating new forms out of torn fragments gives me a momentary sense of hope that a new ideology can be created from the current predicament, improving the likelihood of ultimate human survival.
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