Exhibits,

Dan Peter Petersen Ready To Ship

Dan Peter Petersen exhibits locally in Melbourne and is currently undertaking his Master of Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne. Recent exhibitions include “On hubris, irony and schadenfreude” at Lon Gallery (2016), “Excessive Convenience” at TCB Art Inc (2015) and “No More Drama” at Seventh Gallery (2015).

“Ready To Ship”, is an exhibition of receptacles, containers, boxes, cartons, packages and envelopes. Each of which contain a certain personal collection, such as ‘all the hair from haircuts given at a past address, or all transaction receipts from the 2010 to 2015’.

Each of the pieces (containers) in the exhibition use a certain tool as plinth, such as scales and hand trolleys, referencing devices that aid in the movement or comprehension of objects. These items demonstrate their own ‘readiness’ to be transported, inherently mobile by design.

The exhibition is a display of the intersection between my ever-present compulsions to collect and archive and my constant inability to feel secure enough to ‘unpack’. The precise cataloguing of specific collections reduces the mental and physical weight of many years of accumulation.

The exhibition presents some of the absurdities of sentimentality in a positive and constructive light, questioning what it is to assign value to banal objects. The austerity and practicality of packaging devices is offset by the fundamentally impractical and romantic nature of amassing ‘useless’ items.

Rather than the obvious and tried method of discarding all of one’s material possessions, as artists have done triumphantly in the past (Baldessari’s cremating of all of his paintings between 1953-1966/ Michael Landy systematically destroying absolutely everything he owned) I wish to present a method of efficient organization and compartmentalization, coolly and calmly “hanging on”.

Documentation by Christo Crocker.