Our Sweet Baby

  • Cearah Peck

  • Our Sweet Baby

  • Cearah Peck is a multimedia artist living in Brooklyn, NY. This year, they received their BFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design. Their work deals with childhood trauma, distortion of memory, and kitsch, taking the form of multimedia installation that includes video, sound, quilted photographic transfers, sculpture, and edible images. Peck is interested in subverting kitschy, even twee, content, evoking inevitable nostalgia while exploring the materialistic and manufactured quality of memory. Cearah’s work has been published in POND Magazine’s inaugural print publication, Lippy Kids Magazine, and Sukeban Magazine.

  • Our brain’s processes for remembering the past and imagining the future are virtually identical. When involuntary autobiographical memories are triggered – by smell, taste, sound, touch, sight – there’s a chance that the “memory” we recall is something that never occurred; rather, the “memory” was an event we vividly imagined. We recall the daydream without the context that we were daydreaming. Memory is a wholly unreliable and malleable process. My work deals with the unreliability and distortion of memory in relationship to my familial history. Aesthetically, I subvert kitschy, even twee, content, evoking inevitable nostalgia while exploring the materialistic and manufactured quality of memory. The work takes the form of multimedia installation that includes video, sound, quilted photographic transfers, sculpture, and edible images. I create a dialogue between the documented past and the present, enshrining a photo from my sixth birthday in translucent gel medium and replicating a birthday cake in paper mache and spackling. Through the use of Hello Kitty cartoons and other childhood icons, I undercut trauma with fantasy, mimicking the way children escape from reality through play. Despite the vivid, cartoonish quality of the work, there is a sense of discomfort and danger lying beyond the frame.