Rachel Peek

Hello, my name is Rachel Peek. I seek to understand fears in many of my works. Phobias are such an intriguing topic to me because I only have one. I find that not many people understand my Trypophobia, so until I can effectively show my fear, I seek to understand my viewers’ phobias.  My work takes these phobias to an extreme in order to invoke the irrational fear that lays inside the viewer.

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I take a lot of inspiration from the Surrealism period, in which a realistic scene is taken and twisted to show the unconscious mind. This is fascinating to me because it shows what a person is truly thinking, even if they do not know it, in ways that cannot be expressed in the real world. Sometimes feelings cannot be spoken or addressed using realistic scenes, so I like to express that in my works. One common way for me to do this is removing heads and either replacing them with an object, or just removing them entirely.

 

For example, in my work Video-head I take a normal person and replace their head with a PlayStation controller. This was based off of my brother who was obsessed with videogames, it seemed that it was the only thing in his mind and that it was controlling him.

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I find phobias intriguing because I seek to understand others and their feelings. I myself do not understand these feelings or fears, but I wish to learn, and now I can ask, what scares you the most? How are you feeling today?