anonymous gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Peter Brock, on view from April 24 through May 29. In this body of work, Brock continues his sustained exploration of the horizon as a spatial device and ontological proposition.

Across the paintings, the horizon emerges as a site of negotiation, a framework through which the hopes and anxieties of the present moment are both projected and held in suspension. A strip of polished metal bisects each composition, dividing two luminous planes. This gesture evokes familiar partitions in the physical world - atmospheric thresholds, architectural seams, distant vanishing lines. At the same time, it alludes to the binary logic that underpins contemporary systems of computation, introducing a subtle but persistent technological register.

Rather than resolving these associations into a fixed thesis, Brock sustains a productive tension between embodied perception and rational structure. The works resist conclusion, instead inviting viewers to linger with the irreducible qualities of sensation, material, and form.

ANTHROPIC

Or, The End of the Myth.

Or, The Invention of Nature.

Or, American Technological Sublime.

Or, The Limited Sphere.

Or, An Ear at the Edge of a Chasm.

Or, The Terminal Lens.

Or, A Mirror at the Command of Our Spasms.

Metaphors domesticate the unknown and defamiliarize the everyday by way of comparison. They are aesthetic gestures that bind together distinct phenomena in a mimetic relationship without actually defining either entity—an interdependency of images. In her book God, Human, Animal, Machine. (2021), Meghan O’Gyblien describes the importance of metaphor in our relationship to technology and the mysteries of consciousness. She argues that that tendency to anthropomorphize large language models as an inversion of Imago Dei— the tenet of Christian theology which asserts that human beings were created in God's image. These are machines made in the image of human consciousness. She also calls attention to the ways that the language of computation now permeates the discourse around how our minds work (processing, signals, bandwidth, etc). This urge to describe the human brain as a computer coincides with the ongoing efforts to make computers that function like brains.

Anthropos (ἄνθρωπος) is the Greek word for human being or the human condition. The word has been in continual use for more than 3,000 years. Thucydides used the word extensively in his discussion of fundamental human motivations—fear, honor, and strategic leverage through the pursuit of resources—in his History of the Peloponnesian War (430-400BCE). The San Francisco-based company that calls itself Anthropic was founded in 2021 and named their large language model Claude in honor of the American polymath Claude Shannon.

In his 1948 paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Claude Shannon laid the groundwork for modern computation by proposing a system of communication that is completely agnostic to meaning. The purpose of binary code is to eradicate ambiguity for the sake of accuracy and efficiency. Zeros and ones constitute a language of absolute certainty and correlate perfectly with the two possible states of an eclectic circuit: closed or open. This system regards communication as an engineering problem in which bodily sensation or social context have no relevance. Binary code remains the underlying medium of all digital signals to this day including the output of neural networks—from whose mysterious behaviour engineers coax useful results by adjusting numerical weights.

Languages embed the limitations that are necessary in order for them to function. Comparing machine intelligence to the human mind speaks to the dazzling mimicry of large language models but also the willingness to reduce human experience to statistically quantifiable dimensions. The extent to which this assumption misrepresents our nature has been overshadowed by the extreme convenience and productivity delivered by the information science revolution. Technological change shifts our model of selfhood without bringing us any closer to a clarity of purpose.

A mirror reflects an image without offering a justification—showing everything and perceiving nothing. An axis of symmetry is also a dividing line. The horizon presents the illusion of a dichotomy that recedes as we chase it.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Peter Brock (b.1986) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He has an MFA in painting from the Milton Avery School of Art at Bard College, and studied in Monika Baer’s class at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, Germany. His work has been exhibited at Someday Gallery, New York; Nicelle Beauchenne Gallery, New York; Diez Gallery, Amsterdam; Public Gallery, London; South Parade, London; Goeben, Berlin; Root Canal, Amsterdam; Calle Cedro 328, Mexico City; Peana Projects, Monterrey; _2B, Madrid; and Federico Vavasorri, Milan, among others. He received the IAAC award for art criticism in 2021 and has published reviews and essays with Frieze Magazine, ArtReview, Art Forum, E-Flux Criticism, Texte Zur Kunst, Flash Art, Mutt NYC, The Brooklyn Rail, and Artillery Magazine.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:  

Peter Brock .