Peter Voshefski

General Artist’s Statement

My paintings are concerned with the sublime pleasureful anxiety in the specific moments and places that inhabit life’s experiences. These things evoke the questions: What is here? What is missing? What is desired? In this spirit I paint with explicit and implicit elements of space and time, and a language of desire, longing, history, and mythology. My paintings reveal as much as they conceal in a translucent mist of images and fragments that occupies empty spaces.

Artist’s Statement: 2005

I’m pursuing images that speak to an ecstatic inter-connectedness that is the architecture of being. Large themes of human and nature, human in nature + human existence on a more mythic level are also evident. They are a reflection of existential irony.
I look…through a filter, a microscope, underwater, in flight, sleeping and awake. Image about mycology (fungus science) are very dominant. I’m interested in fungus not because of mushroom trip visionaryism (although that is there too) but more in the sense that they are this web that exists all around: living, eating, breathing, recycling. They are the structure that interconnects our biologic systems. On other levels the work is about the conflict of image making and the proper place that images should occupy…you know, what do we do with it if it doesn’t exactly hang neatly on a wall?
The image-objects (wood block, two-sided works) seem to me more like archaeological finds, trinkets, and scraps and shards that have an enigmatic beauty because they aren’t immediately contextualizable or understandable without further research and reflection.


From a show preview in the Santa Fe Reporter, October 2004:
Peter Voshefski hones his acrylic paintings with a fine edge of ink and his simple subject matter with existential irony, powerful graphic sensibility, gifted composition and some damned funny thoughts.

Short Biography: Peter Voshefski

Born: 1967 in Cincinnati, Ohio
BFA: University of Cincinnati 1991
MFA: University of New Mexico 2002
Began drawing and painting as a child. Pursued photography as an undergraduate but discovered a true vocation as a painter. Worked 1991-1997 as an artist’s assistant for the video artist Nam June Paik constructing sculptures, large scale public commissions, and installing shows in venues around the world including the Venice Bienale, Worlds Fairs in Sevilla, Spain and Taejon, Korea. Lived in southern Mexico and the Yucatan Peninsula in the late 90’s trekking through villages and ruin sites, speaking Spanish, and discovering a love for Mexico, its people, and its history…as well as an obsession for painting on the road. Moving to New Mexico in 1999 brought constant opportunities to adventure in outback, backpacking and painting at the same time. Participated in the inaugural of a program at UNM called Land Arts of the American West in which 15 artists spent a fall moving about the southwest region seeing land art sites, archaeological sites, and amazing geology all the while creating unique, nom-impactive land art projects and other art works. Currently lives and paints in Albuquerque's beautiful North Valley...leaving the city at every chance to be in nature.