Peggy Preheim

Born 1963 in Yankton/SD, lives and works in New York





Gallery:
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York


In a country known for its outsized endeavors and interest in bigness, Peggy Preheim is a brilliant, against-the-grain miniaturist working in drawing, sculpture, and photography, and her intricate graphite drawings are especially compact, some measuring a mere 1 x 1 inch. Most of these drawings are faithfully based on found nineteenth and early twentieth-century photographs of anonymous people⎯usually, but not only, women and children. Preheim’s project could easily connote a worldwide drift of unstable information and imagery, shorn of context and unmoored from any recognizable meaning, but in fact exactly the opposite occurs. Her works are deeply meaningful and evocative, and her transformations of old materials seem utterly current and fresh, dealing not with the distant past but with complicated human matters right here and now.

In the diptych Little Princess, 2008, what looks at first like a dot or jot from a distance is actually a drawing of a limp American flag on a flagpole. This symbol of mighty nationhood suddenly seems fragile, precarious, and almost overwhelmed by the surrounding whiteness of the paper, which seems comparatively vast. As Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin points out, an important aspect of carnival life involves exaggerating, parodying, and distorting otherwise revered political and religious symbols, not in order to make fun of them, but so that they temporarily cannot hold us in their thrall, and so that we might approach them with freshness and freedom. In Preheim’s adjacent drawing, a pensive, circa 1910 woman in white bloomers and a bowler hat seems to be gazing at the flag with sadness, wavering hopefulness, tenderness, and concern. Reaching deeply into the past, Preheim’s images subtly illuminate a convulsive present, with all its troubles, tarnished ideals, and renewed hope.

 

Exhibitions | Bibliography

Exhibitions:
2008–2010: Peggy Preheim: Little Black Book, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield/CT; Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa/OK; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca/NY
2008: Don’t Look Now, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
2007: New Directions in American Drawing, The Columbus Museum, Columbus/GA; Telfair Museum, Savanna/GA 2007; Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville/TN 2007–2008

Bibliography:
Peggy Preheim, texts by Carter Foster, Gregory Volk, and Harry Philbrick, exh. cat. The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield/CT 2008  
Ken Johnson, “Contemplating Childlike Wonder, Long Past Childhood,” in The New York Times, September 2, 2005
Anastasia Aukeman, “Peggy Preheim at Tony Bonakdar,” in Art in America, October 2001