Milly Peck at Assembly Point, Peckam

Peck’s show at Assembly Point seems to be the aesthetic love-child of pop art and minimalism, blending stylised ‘pop’ representation with the colour and shape neutrality of minimalism.

Despite the neutral palette of the show – black, white and grey – ‘Pressure Head’ contains visual dynamism created through the extension of the works into the gallery space.

Depicting various mundane scenes all centered around the theme of washing, ‘Pressure Head’s’ installation places the viewer in a false washroom with its bath-and-tap center piece and various cut-out pipes running to obscure corners of the room.  The use of negative space and integration of the show with the architectural features of the gallery space immerses the viewer in the world of the show, dragging the art into the real and the real into the art. It is this tension between the integration of the works with real space and the clearly stylized and artificial images presented that propels investigation, creates intrigue.

Although the stylised images seem light in tone, the show carries a feeling of low-lying bleakness. The mundane scenes are not only dimensionally flattened, but also removed of colour. The complexity and richness of these actions are stripped from the depiction.