‘Peep Fiction’ is a photographic/ sculptural installation employing repurposed archival photographs in the ArtB&B art hotel in Blackpool, Lancashire – a unique boutique hotel and a very particular space for experiencing art, with rooms designed by over 30 different artists – in a unique seaside resort town. I wanted to capture something of the essence of Blackpool and so I spent a lot of time researching images from the Blackpool History Centre’s impressive archives. I was fascinated by Blackpool’s long, varied, rich and often surprising history as a a pre-eminent town for showbusiness, variety, vaudeville, circus and other forms of popular mass entertainment throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and during my time in the archives, I researched individual life-stories and the wider history of popular entertainment and mass tourism in Blackpool, and made a selection of images of individual characters. These characters – some of whom were well-known historical figures – others whose stories appear here for the first time, all had fascinating stories, which I polished, occasionally embellished and presented in a new and unusual light, in an accompanying text abailable as a hardback book for all guests who visit the room.
I used 21 stereoscopic viewers and embedded them into the furniture of this (beautifully-designed and furnished, but compact) hotel room, in hidden locations – under the bed, inside the wardrobe etc. One or two were placed outside the room in public corridors and even in a hidden location in the hotel bar. When the (human) viewer encounters the (mechanical) slide viewer, there is an interesting interaction, a glimpse into another life, setting off a treasure trail of historical intrigue, which is made more rewarding by having been seen through the intimate and often slightly awkward act of getting up close to the anachronistic and incongruous lenses poking out of, under, behind and inside the furniture.
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