No but literally though. Peeps. Hanging. In a window. Like, peeps as in peepers as in eyeballs. Five hundred of them. Suspended by fishing line from the ceiling of a commercial-style glass-fronted display window. The kind of display window that you might be more likely to associate with an old-fashioned Christmas toyshop display featuring a fat Santa presiding over an electronic train set, blonde curly haired baby dolls sitting on mounds of fake snow, and a jack-in-the-box leering maniacally out of his colorful aluminum shell. Or maybe you’re more the type to associate it with a flashy department store window featuring mannequins sporting the latest ripped designer jeans/sparkly blazer/t-shirt/spiky heels combo (what?). EITHER WAY, I highly doubt you’d be thinking “floating eyeball holding case” and so you might be slightly creeped out if you came across London, Ontario-based Conan Masterson’s latest installation, Peep Show. After all, it has some audacity, just staring at you like that. I mean, who’s the viewer here; the audience of perpetually alert googley eyes gawking out from behind the glass? Or the parade of white-collars, black-clad arties, street people, socialites, skateboard-toting youths, and Flames-jersey’d shoppers that inhabit the +15 pedestrian walkway in downtown Calgary – a labyrinth of indoor pathways built fifteen feet above the street linking all the major office towers and high-traffic shopping and cultural areas of the city centre. Designed to protect those poor, long-suffering Calgarians from the not-unusual minus thirty degree winter chill of the foothills, the +15 pathway, made (in)famous in films like Waydowntown, also entertains with its brightly colored walls, interactive digital maps, historical posters and, yes, half a dozen large display windows designated to various local artist-run-centres. Peep Show (aka “awesome eyeballs” as overheard by a group of passing eight year olds), hosted by Truck Contemporary Art, combines Masterson’s penchant for creating anthropomorphic and eerie fantasy environments out of soft, fluffy textiles. Her 2006 show Kaleidoscopic, for instance, featured a soft forest of enormous, hovering, white trunk-like sculptural forms in a darkly lit, glowing gallery space transformed into a kind of spectral antechamber. For Peep Show, Masterson had to adopt a painstaking construction technique that saw her (pun intended) gluing an army of tiny hole-punched vinyl pupils onto soft blue irises onto bulbous needle felted polyester scleras in an almost masochistically meditative process of repetition. Masterson has an obsession, it seems, with unsettling the banality of passing strangers and unsuspecting urban amblers by injecting the ethereal seduction of a freak-show smack-dab in the middle of their consciousness. Here, Bakhtin’s carnivalesque – that elusive artistic device that subverts and liberates the assumptions of the status quo with humorous chaos – is suspended motionless but watchful in some kind of low-grade fun-house hegemony. Masterson points out the spectacle of the spectacle and draws attention to the deeply embedded visual carnival of our everyday lives. Her work is unnerving, but captivating at the same time – welcoming in its cartoonish sense of humor and inviting materials, but still something you want to keep at arm’s length for all its strangeness. But can you keep a gaze at arm’s length?

Peep Show by Conan Masterson ran at the Truck Gallery +15 window space in Calgary in February and March 2010.

(as published by Modern Fuel A-R-C in Syphon, Issue 1.2)