YOUR APPARITION PASSES THROUGH ME will be installed at Wellfleet Preservation Hall on October 2d 2026. A reception with the artist is scheduled for October 8th 5-7 PM. There will be an artist talk on October 22d at 5:30 PM.
YOUR APPARITION PASSES THROUGH ME constitutes a turn in my work toward haunted and haunting places on Cape Cod. Whether you believe in ghosts or not, there is a layering of human experience I feel whether I’m in town, hiking, or sitting in my 200-year old house. In the woods, across the moors or through the dunes, I never feel alone. I’m aware of those who’ve also traveled these terrains in joy and sadness, and well as abject wonder. Renovating my house I’ve become aware that I live with the decisions, and compromises, of generations who’ve come before me, and that I’m making decisions and compromises with which others likely will live. I’m increasingly turning my eye towards places that have been abandoned, sometimes lost, and occasionally saved. Developed over six weeks, this body of work is not comprehensive, or entirely coherent. It’s the beginning of an investigation that will unfold over time. Like any good ghost story, it infers as much as it says.
I know that one of the responses to this show will be, ‘this doesn’t look like you.’ In the process of making this show I’ve used a variety of painting strategies that are part of my vernacular, but maybe not readily employed in my recent bodies of work. This show looks like work I made a decade ago, twenty-five years ago and even forty years ago. Beyond that, as I wrote recently about a different painting, I think it’s a mistake to think any artist’s work needs to look one way. ‘Style’ is a marketing fiction, but it doesn’t have a lot to do with what an artist does. The narrative within these paintings requires a different vocabulary than some of my other work — in the way that poetry sometimes utilizes words that might not quite fit an essay.
There’s also a fair amount of homage in these paintings — to artists like Lois Dodd, Richard Diebenkorn, Celia Paul, Paul Wonner, Andrew Wyeth, and even Edward Hopper. Homage — or conversations with other painters over time — is emerging as a thread in my work that I intend to continue. Indeed, if nothing else comes from this show, it constitutes a compressed period of experimentation that will hopefully point my in new directions for the years to come.
PETE HOCKING is a painter, teacher, curator & writer on Cape Cod. His work is concerned with nature, place, poetics, and identity. He’s a founding board member of Provincetown Commons, an economic development center for the creative economy. He taught part-time at RI School of Design from 1997- 2022. From 2003-2021 he was full-time faculty in Goddard College’s MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts program. He was director of RISD’s Office of Public Engagement (2007-11), and Associate Dean of the College & Director of the Swearer Center for Public Service at Brown University (1992-2005).
