The long days of summer invite us to breathe, play, and to broaden our sights beyond our tired borders. It is a time to reinvigorate our souls and prepare for the coming unknown. It is in this spirit of rebirth that Peer Gallery will reopen in September, under our new banner, the Michael Mazzeo Gallery. As nights become longer and the languid summer days ease into memory, we are pleased to present our inaugural exhibition, How I Spent My Summer Vacation, featuring work and text inspired by summers present and past, real and imaginary. The 13 artists included in the exhibition display a wide range of style and content.

Craig Barber’s exquisite platinum prints provide us with an elegiac glimpse into the long gone era of the grand Catskill Mountain retreats. Robert Bowen, by digitally re-imagining vintage picture postcards, creates witty scenes of idyllic moments gone awry. Caleb Charland’s gelatin silver prints document the whimsical results of mechanical and pyrotechnic experiments engineered with improvised materials. John Chervinsky tells us a fish story and allows us to see right through it, with x-ray technology. Rachael Dunville presents another of her seductive portraits, this one of a provocative male figure standing in a forest, clad only in his white briefs. Roger Eberhard, a Swiss photographer, captures the searing heat of the desert with his vision of sun scorched land and abandoned structures from his travels through the American West. Sebastian Lemm introduces a new body of large scale work expanding his explorations into structures with lyrical, multi-layered images from the forests of various countries. Julie Peppito provides us with a phantasmagoric insect fabricated from recycled materials and suspended from the ceiling. Cara Phillips sheds light on sun damaged skin and cosmetic surgery with a black and white portrait made with ultraviolet imaging. Josh Quigley’s large scale color print is a delightfully humorous, voyeuristic look at a middle aged nudist wandering around his back yard wearing only sunglasses. Christopher Rauschenberg, in an homage to his father, shows his hand at the end of the funeral procession at the Fish House. Fernando Souto’s magnificent black and white print depicts three generations of cowboys finding relief from the summer sun in the shade of a trailer. Will Steacy’s color portrait lingers on a woman in a swimsuit, casually gazing across a river with her tattooed fish seemingly leaping out of water.