"Down the Road"

Peter Hiers

canvas street prints and spectacular sculptures made from recycled tires, metal and wood

Peter Hiers has been selected this year as one of only four U.S. artists to exhibit his work in the International Biennale in Bejing, China. A rare honor. From his home in Pacific Grove, Peter writes about his original and compelling work:

Rubber Tires:
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.

Landscape Prints:
From the same sources of inspiration for my tire-rubber work, I make these canvas prints from the actual landscape of the streets. By carefully timing my work on the street with safe pauses in traffic flow, I place sheets of canvas over places on pavement where I have observed interesting traffic patterns and street textures. The more familiar I have become watching both traffic flow and its interaction with pavement textures, the better I am able to gauge the visual potential in various sites, although unpredictability plays an excitingly significant role. Sometimes the violence of the traffic rips the canvas to shreds; other times fascinating patterns emerge. By taking imprints of our fossil-fuel culture that are left on a specific spot on the surface of our planet during a short time period, then placing them in a frame on a wall, I see the impact of our daily lives a bit differently. Unlike graffiti artists or those like Cristo who add pigments or materials to a landscape, this work captures marks not usually seen or noted that would have otherwise been added to the
landscape, and removes them to another context. Taking these impressions from the surface of a landscape and placing them vertically on a wall forces a different perspective on vehicular activity. I am able to take advantage of both the traffic imprints and also digital photography technology, to produce limited editions of hygienically clean and framed
final prints.

Location: MPC Art Gallery, 980 Fremont St., Monterey

Hours: Monday - Thursday 11:00am - 4:00pm
(or by appointment; call 646-3060)

Gallery Receptions

• Thursday, October 12, 12:30 – 2:00 PM (ARTISTS’ TALK 1:00 PM)
• Saturday, October 14, 4:00-6:00 PM

Admission to exhibit is free on, all are welcome!.

** MPC parking fee: $3 on weekdays. **