The Peeps Project

May 14, 2016 by Adrienne 1 Comment

In my post on mail art, I mentioned that many mail artists often start projects. They could be small, perhaps an “add and pass” piece of art that passes between a few people, or they could be very large like the one that Jack from Cascadia Artpost undertook in 2015. His “Peeps Project” has 27 participants from 7 countries. We were all correspondents of Jack’s and he asked us if we’d like to be involved. If we said Yes! we received something that looked like this in the mail.

Box full of “peeps” from Cascadia Artpost.

And inside were a lot of little characters, the “peeps.” Our challenge was to create scenarios for these miniature people and create pieces of art. (This is part of what they wrote to us: “Your mission in this project, should you choose to accept it, is to change the world and the very foundation of reality, at 1:87 scale or full scale, and record with photos individual peeps or groups of peeps in settings and scenarios of your choosing.”)

Some people really got into it, even creative a narrative story for their characters) but I stewed and stewed over mine and actually found it quite difficult (I also don’t have a great camera, which was an excuse I held onto for a long time), but I did finally get a handful together. I’ve posted a few examples below, but what’s even more astounding about this time-intensive project is that Jack and his friend Colin (from “Very Dodgy Mail”) made the book, a hand-bound hard-cover copy of a 142-page book (+ an insert), and send one to each of us. Dedication or what? Here’s what arrived a few weeks ago:

Thanks you two for pulling together this crazy project! It’s fun to see what everyone created. I’ve posted a few of the images from the book below.

The peeps at the Grand Canyon by Carol Stetser.

A not-so-great picture of my peeps.

But is it art? by Stewart Charlebois.

Peeps with a graffiti backdrop by Sally Wassink.

Peeps in a Luxembourg studio by Fraenz Frisch.