Peter Cochrane
Exploring queer histories through self-portraiture and installation work is my prime interest. I look to them to create new narratives relating to my ancestors. I use beauty—that which may be calming and safe to look upon—as a tool to surreptitiously advance difficult discussions on death, inhumanity, desire, trauma, and recovery. As photography is familiar to everyone in the personal sense, as a record of our lives and moments and families, I use it as a lure to bring people into my reality. The conversation about the photograph as a true or dishonest medium merges in the middle for me. It is both truth and lie, the assimilation of all aspects of my personality with all angles of history, the only way that I can find to tell the wordless parts of my story.
I am an artist and an author. My writings and/or art have appeared in BOMB, Headmaster magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, make/shift, SFAQ/NYAQ/AQ, Artslant, and have been translated into Italian in a book you’ll never find. I have created books that have traveled to the Vancouver Art/Book Fair, the Los Angeles Art Book Fair, multiple Bay Area book fairs, and the Room&Book fair at the ICA in London. I work with and have an unhealthy adoration for flowers.
