Brittain on Brittish

New Raleigh: I was really interested in your “Brittish” alphabet. How and why did you develop it?
Brittain Peck: When I was in school I was painting murals and one of them was this really large public mural that was in a parking deck. It was four and a half stories in a stairway. It was like a comic strip that ran up the whole thing and I needed to write text in all these different cartoon bubbles. I was trying to figure out a way to write text really quickly and in my sketchbooks I had been doing these little block letters where I would just draw a box and then kind of draw in the lines that would make the negative space for the letters so then you could read the word. So I did that same idea with white paint over a black rectangle and I could make words really fast. From that I got the idea that I could take away the black rectangle and just do the same lines and treat them as their own letters.

NR: What themes are you going for with your “Between Me and You” show?
BP: It’s mostly about how we view “otherness”, whether that’s people from other countries, other faiths, or other languages. The idea is that people from the U.S. never get to leave the U.S., so people get very comfortable with always being “normal”. I’m taking a lot of things that are very common and moving them back a layer so they feel less common and less comfortable. The image that I’ve got on the flyer is the American flag with the national anthem written on it, so it’s two things that are very common and usually go together. You usually sing that song when you look at the flag, but when people see it written in a different- it’s still in English, but when they see it written in different characters like that, a lot of people think it’s something totally foreign. The idea is to imagine what it would be like if we could be ourselves as foreign people.

NR: What mediums are predominantly used in your show on Friday?

BP: Printmaking, like, relief printing is the main one, and painting. They’re some acrylic paint, ink- I guess you could call that painting, but you could also call it drawing.

NR: What kind of feeling are you hoping viewers will leave with after seeing your show?

BP: A lot of my show is kind of tongue in cheek, like it’s kind of lowbrow jokes. A lot of people have seen this sort of text before on license plates that say, “FLY” or woodblocks that say “Jesus”, so it’s very lowbrow art. So a lot of it’s kind of a joke, but a lot of it also deals with more serious issues that have a lot of emotional connection for people, like religion and national identity. I want people to not laugh at themselves, but if they feel a little bit of discomfort at first for not being able to read it, that’s the main thing. I want people to feel that discomfort and then realize that they want to move on. We don’t like being in situations where we don’t understand or relate to things.

 

Peck’s New Raleigh sponsored art show, “Between Me and You”, opens this Friday at Designbox at 6pm and continues through June 27th.