Third Person Omniscient
Peter Price’s Third Person Omniscient at Snide Hotel Gallery
Peter Price’s debut solo exhibition at Snide Hotel Gallery, Third Person Omniscient, implies through name and form, an arcane tether spanning time and space, cast and narrator. Three large-scale square paintings, staged on each wall of the single-room gallery, enclose an arrangement of wooden chairs without hosts. Five gathered side by side titled, Occultation, Congregation I, II, III, IV, V (2025), are elevated on a wide, low pedestal and peer down at a lone grounded chair, Pulpit (2025), the resting place from which the artist paints.
The raised communion are chairs in mid-20th century style, designed to prioritize mass-market durability for use in schools and other institutions. Their construction and placement invoke the tradition, authority, and nostalgia of the past. A united front, the empty seats offer council and confrontation to their ostracized peer below. Concrete blocks surround this grounded outlier and carefully positioned flora in corresponding muted tones sprout from the grooves and gaps in raw cement.
Detail of Those Who Sin And Fill Their Lungs With Songs Sung By Severed Tongues
The artist relays that these natural materials were gathered days before the opening from just outside his studio. The arrangements recall small blades of grass and weed which find their narrow paths through cracks in city sidewalk. These materials form a makeshift guard. They prevent how close we may come and negate any prospect of the chair’s utility. Preventative measures resist the reprieve of intimacy or rest, protecting the vulnerable helm of creative agency.
The six harmonize around absence—outstretching an unfulfilled offer to both a jury and accused missing in action. Truant wooden bodies harken back to ancient petroglyphs, while summoning the collective experience of schoolroom idleness, where anonymous classmates scrawled cryptic or lewd inscriptions into patient timber tablets. Price’s own “Was Here” emerges in his signature motifs of wreathing organic material. Candelabras, tree branches, and celestial patterns recall vastness of natural space and invite sublime ceremony.
Painting and chair converse through this shared symbolism, with sculpture embodying structure through architectural form and painting echoing the same through the direct depiction of architecture itself. In both painted works, These Withered Stones Still Break Bones (2025) and A Grave With No Trace Burned By The Gaze Of A Masked Face (2024), black voids spread out from center, jutting out to the edges. Chalky outlines of church facades are framed, recalling the filigree of a stained-glass window. The weight of ecclesiastical authority is anchored by geometric framing, mirroring themes of power and stability latent in the exhibition’s sculptural work.
These Withered Stones Still Break Bones, charcoal, pastel, gesso, and paper on wood
While the paintings agree in composition and imagery, These Withered stands at odds with its companions. Like the panel of chairs, it rests, perched atop a narrow table. Despite reverent placement and the work’s papal imagery, the viewer is denied any notion of pious comfort. The color palette across the exhibition remains restricted and severe. In tandem with deep abrasions in the work’s surface, a visceral urgency radiates. Crimson charges the work with passion and intensity, and in deep black recesses, the fear of absence and gravity of infinite mystery swim.
In Third Person Omniscient, skies have darkened and the audience has cleared their seats. What may have once been smoothed over, has now begun to deteriorate. Ghostly forms of trees and clouds roll across gritty canvas and a foreboding red horizon. Black power lines crowd layered compositions. In the work, Those Who Sin And Fill Their Lungs With Songs Sung By Severed Tongues (2025), these towers of progress are given center stage, once again adrift in the dark spotlight of an unfolding vacancy. The presence of electrical wire, creeping over nearly every corner of contemporary landscape, counteracts orthodoxy’s nod to past and tradition. The promising architecture of technology charges the scene, and here in particular.
Scan of Life Magazine clipping of NASA control board
At opposite ends of the room, turned toward each other, pairings of sculpture and painting face off—their relationship fraught with intimacy and tension. They are friends gathered round. They are wrestlers before a match, nose to nose. On a side wall, framed photos offer insight into the work. The scavenged assortment of ephemera is a glimpse into collected visual scraps of inspiration. Centered amongst the salon of disparate images is an oval frame, slightly larger than the rest. The image is a Life Magazine clipping, depicting a NASA control board during a lunar mission. Price again foregrounds his creative process in the installation by unveiling reference images that span backward and forward, beyond and above.
In Third Person Omniscient, Price sculpts and paints architectural portals, placing us on the front porch of some cosmic, universal intersection. Each object its own character, the artist congregates them in hushed communion. Does the distance roused by absence and scale reveal information, or obscure? Does it grant authority, or does frayed perspective strip it away? Hovering above, temporality lurks in dark corners. Hopeful and threatening, it hums through chipped notches of paint and finds solace in each vacant seat.
Third Person Omniscient is on view at Snide Hotel Gallery from September 17 through October 16, 2025.
This piece can be found in Kudzu jelly’s zine publication, Third Person Omniscient.
