Peter Peryer | Wanted Dead or Alive: {Suite} Ponsonby

{Suite} Ponsonby is delighted to present Wanted Dead or Alive, the first solo exhibition of work by the late Peter Peryer at our Auckland gallery. Having begun his practice later on in life, Peryer was largely self-taught and developed a singular style that marked him apart from his contemporaries. Captured with meticulous care and formal focus, Peryer's photography entombs excerpts of the everyday in a world of his own creation, transmogrifying commonplace objects into psychologically charged studies that resist straightforward interpretation.

Wanted Dead or Alive features a suite of animal photographs; a subject matter which the artist returned to throughout his practice. However, as often occurs in Peryer's work, not all is as it seems at first glance. His images play on themes of duplicity and doubleness, prompting viewers to consider the permeable relationship between nature and artifice. Are the animals depicted dead or alive? Are they real or artificial; and what new meaning comes to bear once the viewer decides either way? Through intimate focus, distorted scale, and carefully arranged compositions, Peryer complicates this decision-making process, forcing us to continuously question the nature of his subjects.

While thematic undertones persist across Peryer's body of work, each photograph is distinct and possesses its own unique presence. They are united, however, by a shared uncanniness. Whether the bust of an owl, portrait of a peacock, or profile of a rhinoceros, Peryer captures what is recognisable and renders it unfamiliar, ever testing the ways of seeing.