Peeps

Born in 1977... I am a child of the 1980s, a time when candy still carried the illusion of purity and Halloween was a night of unburdened freedom. Sugar was not yet a cautionary tale, and confections like Peeps were symbols of an innocent, colorful indulgence. This cultural nostalgia, however, is as artificial as the marshmallow treats themselves—a bright, chemically preserved memory that, over time, dulls and fades.

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The Peeps series emerged from my early Confections body of work but quickly expanded beyond containment, much like the materials themselves. It is a meditation on balance, division, and transformation—a visual and material study in permanence and impermanence, vitality and entropy, celebration and decay. The foundational compositions were designed with a 50/50 split, juxtaposing the hyper-saturated confections against a stark white plane. Over time, this contrast dissolves as the artificial dyes inevitably fade, the colors bleeding into pallid nothingness. The work reveals itself not in its immediate state but in its slow surrender to time. What begins as vibrant confectionary joy—synthetic, sweet, and seemingly eternal—erodes into monochromatic neutrality.

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Here, balance is both a visual construct and an occult principle. The duality within the work—presence and absence, life and death, preservation and dissolution—echoes esoteric ideals of equilibrium. The initial contrast between candy’s excess and the void of blank space is a ritualized transformation, an alchemical process where two opposites merge into sameness. As the colors fade, as the materials degrade, the final form of the work is revealed: a ghostly memory of its former self, a silent requiem for indulgence.

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Peeps, as a mass-produced artifact, serve as an entry point into a broader commentary on sugar’s influence on society. Once a rare luxury, sugar has become an omnipresent force—an addiction, an economy, a tool of corporate control. It fuels celebration and decay in equal measure, embedding itself in both ritual and excess. Like the Peeps in this work, sugar has infected culture, simultaneously sustaining and corrupting. It is a substance that preserves yet poisons, a sweet agent of transformation and erosion.

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The Peeps works do not stop at fading; they undergo further transformation through burning, where vibrancy is erased not by time but by fire. This is an extension of the central theme: the obliteration of what once was, the finality of impermanence. The original concept—an almost humorous play on composition as a double white painting—reveals itself fully only after time has done its work. What began as a celebration ends in silence. The calm after the party.

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In this way, the Peeps series aligns with the work of Dieter Roth, who embraced the decomposition of his materials as an essential part of the art itself. Roth’s use of chocolate, bread, and organic matter acknowledged that decay was inevitable and should be welcomed as part of the piece’s evolution. While Roth’s works rotted naturally, the Peeps deteriorate in an unnaturally slow, artificial way—proof of their synthetic origins. Their sugar stiffens rather than molding, their colors fade rather than darken, and yet, in the end, they too are reduced to dust, memory, and archival remnants.

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Time may be the final collaborator. The works document an unfolding process, forcing us to consider the impermanence of color, celebration, and existence itself. In the end, everything is reduced to a sum of its parts. Nothing is permanent. Nothing is forever vibrant.