Contact

3126 East Road

Boonville, NY 13309

liquidwavesoflove@yahoo.com

Education

1995: Obtained General Education Diploma, Rome City School District. Rome, NY.

1996: Received Four-Year Correspondence Program Diploma, The Art Instruction School.

1996: Watercolor Certificate, Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute, Utica NY. Studied with W. Ralph Murray.

1997: Became a Senior Fellow.

1997: Began Biblical Studies at Central New York Bible School. Rome, NY.

1997: Had my Day In Court (5/17/97).

2003: Ended Biblical Studies at Central New York Bible School. Rome, NY.

2003: Studied computer programming for video gaming, DigiPen Institute of Technology. Redmond, WA.

Publications

Prosser, Peter L. Chocolate Chip Cookies and a Wired Dog: The Story of My Wonderful Life. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, Inc, 2005. ISBN: 0595377351

Current Projects

1994 – Present: Writing. Personal folklore, political and social commentary, humor. (www.andawireddog.com)

2002 – Present: Spoken-word works, collected on CDs. 34 discs, 73 hours. Commentary, storytelling, humor, ranting.

2004 – Present: Liquid Waves of Stevens Website. Co-creation, writing, images. (liquidwaves.blogspot.com)

Exhibitions – Staged Works

July 1993: Gum Sculpture construction and installation. Camden Central High School, Camden, NY. (A 6 x 12 feet square addition to the façade)

1994 – 1997: Gum Sculpture construction and installation. 4089 Route 69 Taberg, NY. (A 2 x 5 x 2 foot sculpture)

June 1995: The Gum Books. Camden Central High School, Camden, NY. (Textbooks defaced with gum on specific pages.)

1997: The Mail Order Projects. (Three projects where bill-me-later items were ordered as gifts for unsuspecting acquaintances.)

1994 – 1998: Jim’s Ditch. Coonrod, NY. (A continual project collecting and distributing items along a 30-foot section of ditch.)

August 1999: Wal-Mart Walk. (A project of miss-shelving and rearranging stock items.)

Artist's Statement

Peter Prosser | Artist’s Statement

Unqualified Commentary

The majority of my current work centers on the practice of vehement, unqualified commentary. In an era of 24/7 news cycles, blogs, and podcasts, the entree of the individual voice into the international arena is both tremendously possible and fundamentally incoherent, lost in a cloud of multivalent perspectives.

I try to localize my commentaries in those areas where broad phenomena touch my life. Four categories come to mind: “the problem of family,” “the (un)intelligibility of technology,” “the horizons of belief,” and finally, “the quagmire of the body politick.” Through the forms of ranting spoken-word sound bites, socio-political digital collages, written interfamilial folklore, and other outlets, I engage the pivot point between reasoned conviction and unbalanced invective.

Project Overviews

Given that my work can seem esoteric, I offer the following short descriptions of my current and past projects to give you an idea of what I am about.

Writing

I am currently in the midst of a three-volume work consisting of a personal semi-fictionalized narrative of my life experiences. The first book, Chocolate Chip Cookies and a Wired Dog: The Story of my Wonderful Life, was published in the fall of 2005, having been completed in 2002. The second work, tentatively titled My Missing Father and a Point to Ponder, is nearly complete. I hope for publication early next year.

Audio

Since 2002 I have created sound clips as a means to comment on issues that impact my life and, perhaps more importantly, to comment on the prevalence of commentary in our media-driven world. Who is qualified to comment, and on what? What is the “spin” of commentary? These and other questions are fodder for my clips, no matter what the subject matter might be. Overwrought and vehement like their analogues in the mass-media culture, these spoken-word works have been described as “a mix between Rush Limbaugh, Lewis Black and Andrew Dice Clay.”

Directed Satire

I co-run a blog that deals entirely with satirical attacks on a church organization based in Baltimore, Maryland that is widely considered to be a cult by watchdog groups. I grew up in a church that was loosely affiliated with this organization. For almost four years I, and several others, have run this site as a means to directly attack this organization and as a resource for individuals who have escaped the cult.

The Gum Works

These works, which included freestanding sculptures, materials spread into books and on walls, where meant to literally “gum up the works.” These works were less about any message and more about creating a blockage for others to deal with. In each case frustration built up, sometimes for years, before people took action to remove the sculptures.

The Mail Orders

In these projects bill-me-later items were ordered as gifts for unsuspecting acquaintances. The point was to both witness and imagine the ways in which people would deal with the sudden possessions foisted upon them. Perhaps the highlight of these projects was when a “sword of the ninja” was sent and an intense battle broke out within the receiver’s family.

Jim’s Ditch

For a number of years I engaged in a systematic project of dumping items in a ditch along a stretch of local highway. Interspersed with basic garbage were gifts, including collaged artworks, magazines, beverages, yard ornaments, and other things meant to pique the interest of the people who lived in the home along that part of the road. As time went by, the inhabitants began to collect out some of these gifts, lining them up along the ditch. I knew the project was a success when the yard ornaments took up residence in their lawn. Similar to the Mail Orders projects, the idea was to see how people dealt with a sudden mass of items that they had not bargained for, especially in an anonymous, perplexing context.

Wal-Mart Walk

In this project I spent several weeks going to a local Wal-Mart almost every day in order to move stock items into incorrect areas. Data was collected regarding customer and employee reaction to these instances. Kicker is, I actually got paid for it!