We recently connected with Monica Carrier and have shared our conversation below.

Monica , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Do you think your parents have had a meaningful impact on you and your journey?

Starting around 5th grade, I played sports. This was because a friend who I really wanted to be like played sports, so I begged my parents to let me join a soccer team she was on. I loved playing sports and subsequently joined many more teams. I still love playing sports. These days I swim almost every day (I love it so!). While being a part of athletics teams was invaluable to me – I have so many reasons I am grateful to have had these opportunities – that’s not exactly what I’m getting at when talking about what my parents did right. What they did right in this case was that they let me choose to join the team, because it was my interest – while my interest was not even wholesome, I was copying another kid I perceived to be cool – but my parents consistently allowed me to follow my own desires, for whatever reasons I had, immature or not.

I am the youngest of five children. My parents never forced their interests on us as any sort of mandatory extracurricular (except when my dad made me listen to jazz music in the car when I really just wanted Q102, Philadelphia’s adolescents’ favorite hit music station in the 90s and of course, we had to go to church, but that’s a whole other story). All four of my siblings and I ended up with varied interests and expressions of such. I never felt family pressure to be a certain way, or to follow in anyone’s footsteps. My parents seemed to have the natural inclination and important insight that each of their children was our own unique person with our own interests, desires and paths to take.

I still feel this today, an innate freedom to be my own person and the confidence that I will be accepted by my family whichever way that may lead me. I know how incredibly lucky I am to have been gifted that .

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am first a visual artist. I decided when I was around twelve years old to dedicate myself to the visual arts and I haven’t stopped since. These days I work primarily with ink on paper with topics that celebrate the absurd along with the sincere. While my personal studio work has been influenced by a variety of artists, in particular Matisse, Alice Neel, David Hockney and Kerry James Marshall, I have also long been excited about artist collectives and collaborations.

I drew inspiration from groups like Cobra, Dada and the Hairy Who? and began throwing art parties/shows as a teenager. PeepSpace is an outcropping of the artists for artists sentiments that were so vital to these arts movements’ successes. So when I met my friend Jane Kang Lawrence, and we were both interested in starting an artist run space, it made so much sense to me to follow through. And so PeepSpace was born!

PeepSpace is a contemporary art space founded along the idealistic vision of artists believing in other artists’ work and making space for it. Since June 2020 (yes, we signed our lease on March 1, 2020 and started our endeavor along with the global covid pandemic, unbeknownst to us – I’ll get into that later) PeepSpace has hosted hundreds of contemporary artists’ work.

Upcoming there will be a great group show entitled Brain Candy, curated by the artist Iris Jaffe, scheduled for this Spring, as well as other future exhibitions organized by myself, other artists and curators and some selected from our regular open calls.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

In terms of pivoting, I mentioned in an earlier answer that PeepSpace signed our lease on March 1st, 2020. So that certainly required a lot of rethinking of plans. One change that we had to make, was for our opening receptions. In the beginning we had to hold all outdoor, masked and socially distanced receptions and only allow two visitors in at a time. We even had a mid-winter reception outdoors, complete with a fire pit and inspired by Scandinavian ideals around outdoor winter celebrations.

We realized that keeping the receptions outdoors, was a lovely way to maintain the exhibition space to be about the work installed, and not the crowd. We’ve since embraced this for the shows that we can, using the outdoors as the gathering space, and maintaining a calmer, more viewable show indoors.

I was also grateful to our landlord for working with us financially during that Spring of 2020 when we had to postpone our inaugural show for a couple of months. A kind landlord is so essential to a new business.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

I continue to fully embrace Bathes’s essay “The Death of the Author”. I know that many people may even roll their eyes at the potential trope of this artsy academic theory but I stand by it, both in regard to my personal studio work, as well as in my work organizing other artists’ shows at PeepSpace. In some ways, this is why I have decided to allow my work to include spills and bleeds that can be interpreted like Rorschach tests. At this point in my career, I would never want to tell you what you should experience from my work. In fact I hope that when you see one of my drawings, it’s made in a way that allows you to access your own feelings, memories and associations.

And as far as in my curatorial and facilitating of other artists’ work, I love the new meanings that are born when I’m able to collaborate with others. I like when my curatorial decisions might add to or shift an artist’s original intentions for a work. I love how when two disparate artists’ works are shown near each other, new, otherwise non-existent, associations are born.

For me it all comes down to embracing chance and the encounters that lead to newly created ideas.

So while “The Death of the Author” may be fundamental art school reading, I completely understand the decisions of my mentors and professors who insisted on our study of this essay.

Contact Info:

• Website: monicacarrier.com peepspaceny.com
• Instagram: @monicacandoit @peep_space

Image Credits