Anthony Pedro - TOOTH, TUSK & TALON @ Proximity

Opening Reception: April 1, 2011, 6pm-9pm
Proximity Gallery

If you've ever broken bread with Anthony Pedro you may have noticed a distant look in his eyes, a twitch to his ear as if listening for an approaching storm. Anthony Pedro is in fact a Haunted Man. Down through time blows a wind carrying with it the whispering of grasses and the sad song of flora and fauna long since fossil fuel. He hears this, whether or not he chooses to, and is bound to record it in pigment and oil. The cacophony of teeth in flesh and cackle of nearby hyena keep him up late on tempest wrought nights. The banging of kettledrums and guttural chant is so loud he might as well be standing white knuckled on a steamer, bobbing silently on the Nile or Amazon.

Anthony's pockets are always bulging, filled with a strange array of tools and charms, lest he be ill prepared for when Gia comes crashing through the wall of sleep, the thin veil of time, and confronts him with all the tooth, tusk, and tal...on of his nightmares. He collects bones and hides, but what we don't see is the phantom flesh and sinew that collects and writhes, bleating, howling his name in the horrid tongue of the bush. Even when at peace, his hands twitch and move as if caressing an unseen rifle stock, carved with ornate fetishes and beasts on a drunken night around a campfire in the Burma jungle. Anthony has long since followed the ignis fautus into the misty woods and never returned. Anthony Pedro is a Haunted Man.

While his time as man is of current standing, his soul exists on a wholly different plane, a plane that is choked with vines and abnormally large vegetation. His spirit runs through jungle, desert, and forest alongside beasts man can never ...again behold. His earthly body is a beacon for his mind, which receives the crackle and hisses of transmissions, reporting his travels, hardships, grief, his kill. This is why Anthony Pedro's work is so important, so vital to us. It reads like an environmentalist's journal, which is doomed to jump to and fro different periods, eons, and hemispheres. Without Anthony Pedro's paintings we would not know about his other life, his true self, or his curse. And when soma joins pneuma, and Anthony leaves the present time, we can take solace in the fact that he is now complete, and will forever walk the forest smiling, periodically making bird calls. And when he is gone, his paintings will tell an epic story of an adventure more expansive than the Odyssey. Anthony Pedro is a Haunted, nay, Hunted man.

words: Sam Heimer

Proximity Gallery
2434 East Dauphin Street (in Fishtown)
Philadelphia, PA 19125
Contact: 267-825-2949
E-mail: janel@proximityart.com