A Nervous System

Peter Honig is a Santa Barbara, CA photographer and assemblage artist whose work humorously explores themes of mortality, the nature of self-reflection, human relationships, and the passage of time. Working from a large collection of found objects amassed over two decades, the artist finds expressive possibilities arising from a mass of inanimate debris, creating small tableaux, which he then photographs. The resulting large-scale still life images, miniature models of consciousness, resonate with dark humor and offer entry into an elegantly ordered interior world. His artistic practice has been uniquely informed by his commercial work as a still life product photographer, editorial portraitist, and documenter of other artists' work. His art represents a synthesis of all three genres, merged with elements of Northern California Assemblage and Southern California Conceptualism. Regarding his work, Peter states, "When all goes well, the technical structures of the photographic composition and tonality work together to create and support an internal logic, a scaffold for daydreams, composed from almost nothing, about... almost everything. Both the physical compositions and the logic are fragile constructions, and this fragility echoes what it is to be human, a nervous system”.