'My entire life in Los Angeles has been built upon a moving foundation with art deep at the core. A common thread throughout my artwork is the connection with humanity and nature’s most vulnerable. The subject of the horse is often present in my work representing strength and vulnerability in our culture. As the digital world powers ahead, my art aims at capturing the struggle to maintain relevance in the physical world.'
PAINTINGS
'Flowering', acrylic on canvas, 12 x 12 inches.
Left to right: 'Blue Flash', acrylic on panel, 5 x 4.5 inches. 'Horses', oil on panel, 9 x 14 inches. 'Art Stays', acrylic on panel, 7 x 5.5 inches.
Peggy Sivert (Zask) was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Palos Verdes Peninsula. She received a BA in Art Education from California State University / Long Beach and an MA Humanities from California State University / Dominguez Hills. She served as a Peace Corps Volunteer for two years in Belize, Central America, worked as a high school Art teacher in Manhattan Beach, California and is founder of SoLA Contemporary in South Los Angeles.
'Converge', acrylic, mixed media on canvas, 37 x 55 inches.
Left to right: 'Introduction', Korean pigments on rice paper, 12 x 16.5 inches. 'Little Play', Korean pigment on rice paper, 10 x 13 inches. 'Which Way', Korean pigments on rice paper, 10.5 x 11.5 inches.
'Incoming', Korean pigments on rice paper, 16.5 x 12 inches.
Overview by Pranay Reddy, LA Artcore)
'Peggy Sivert’s art generates out of the site of her home studio at Portuguese Bend in Rancho Palos Verdes, California where she has resided since 1996. Sivert's practice has incorporated sculpture, mixed media, drawing, painting, and assemblage across figuration and abstraction. Her art circulates relationships and themes intertwined with the artist’s involvement in teaching ceramics at a high school level, advocating for the community as nonprofit arts organization director, being a mother to two daughters, and having lifelong exposure and experience with horses and equestrian life. Sivert's body of work utilizes equestrian and architectural motifs as embodiments of memory and lived experience.
Having saved all of her student's 'throwaway' ceramic exercises and stored them in and around her property, she amassed an exhaustive collection reflective of her 20 years of arts pedagogy. As the artist has recently been navigating a space of precarity upon the city's surveying of the stretch of land that sits beneath the artist's and several other neighboring properties, Sivert has found herself fighting not only for her rights to her land, but also to keeping her history, identity, and future intact. In a gesture to steward these experiences, Sivert repurposed her students' ceramic cast-offs, carefully breaking them down and amassing architecturally-inspired totems from their fragments.
The works speak to both Sivert's involvement of the community she worked with, and to her attraction to materials that are considered to be used up.
Having grown up and lived with horses all her life, the horse becomes not only a recognizable form conveyed through the languages of sculpture, drawing, and painting, but also a metaphor of lived experience, and conduit of memory. Using salvaged materials that range from wood, metal, and rubber, Sivert doesn't draw directly from life but sculpts its forms from the memory of its movement.
Sivert's practice is characterized by shifts between abstract and figurative modalities that are inextricably tied to the artist's connection to nature and the community.'
'Hello Woman on a Red Horse', watercolor on paper, 9 x 12 inches.
Left to right: 'Korean Brush Series #3', ink on paper, 15 x 11 inches. 'Korean Brush Series #4 (Yoko)', ink on paper, 15 x 11 inches. 'Korean Brush Series #2 (Endurance)', ink on paper, 15 x 9 inches.
'Nothing is Everything', gets, ink acrylic, oil pastel on fiber, 16 x 15 inches.
SCULPTURES
'Burden', porcelain, 15 x 12 x 7 inches.
Left to right: 'It's a Girl', welded steel, 8 x 8 x 3 feet.
'NY Horse', ceramic, found objects, 14 x 7 x 7.5 inches. 'Krishna', ceramic, found objects, 14 x 17 x 5 inches.
'Protected Area', ceramic shards, 8 x 8 feet.
Left to right: 'LA-1992', stoneware shards, cement, 4.5 x 6 x 3.5 inches. 'Noble Ruins', ceramic shards, cement, 15 x 15 x14 inches.
'Mad Tea', cast-off ceramic shards, 8 x 9 x 8.5 inches.
Left to right: 'Top Half', cast-off unglazed ceramic, 31 x 18 x 18 inches. 'Relics of Process', installation variable, cast-off ceramics, 'Look Up', ceramic shards, 8 x 4 x 7 inches.
'Nomad Installation - Relics of Process', installation variable cast-off ceramics.
Artist, Peggy Sivert with Dodge.
Peggy Sivert, working in her studio. 2022
Instagram: peggysivert2020 and PortugueseBendProjects
