On being an Artist: Action 7

Praxis Artspace
30 July - 21 August 2020

In On Being an Artist Peek responds to the prompt, ‘Do the most obvious thing and then repeat the mistake’. She examines messages she has sent or received across various dating apps, reflecting on the language used to woo potential partners. These messages printed on condoms, colloquially called rubbers, alluding to perceived dating mistakes such as sleeping with someone too soon or misreading lust for love.

The quotes on these condoms are transactional, awkward and mundane. Although grounded in Peek’s own experience she hopes audiences can identify anecdotes from their own dating life in these fragments of text. These messages are a stark contrast to the tropes of love letters or romantic declarations, ubiquitous in the romance genre. Some of these condoms explicitly reference the romance genre such as ‘You had me at Zooper Dooper’, a play on a quote from Jerry Maguire. They demonstrate how - consciously or subconsciously - we reference romance narratives in our own dating lives. Perhaps that is the bigger mistake: assuming that romance looks like it does in the movies.