Peter Sarkisian has spent three decades working at the intersection of film and sculpture, merging the divergent disciplines in new ways to create a hybrid form of multimedia installation. Part moving image, part tactile experience, Sarkisian’s work functions in the space between form and perception, where the viewer’s senses break down and become open to wondrous new possibilities. His work often employs video projection mapped seamlessly onto familiar objects, thereby animating those objects in surreal or uncanny ways to create an experiential form of magical realism.
Grounded in the idea that video in it’s mainstream form is an experientially void medium, Sarkisian‘s work attempts to steer the world’s most influential instrument on a collision course with the viewer in order to introduce physiological experience to the viewing process. He accomplishes this by creating audio/visual illusions that trap the viewer between conflicting interpretations, thereby forcing a state of self-awareness that is otherwise absent while watching television.
If the filmmaker’s traditional goal is to distract viewers through the suspension of self-awareness, then Sarkisian’s goal is to create a sense of heightened self-awareness by engaging the viewer in constructed environments that blur the line between what is real and what is mediated.
Sarkisian studied photography and film at the California Institute of the Arts and the American Film Institute in the 1980’s, and then began working with video as a sculptural element in 1994. Named a Master Video Artist in 2007 by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Sarkisian has exhibited widely throughout the world in major museums and public venues, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Musée Picasso, France, the Hammer Museum of Art, the Albright-knox Art Gallery and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Sarkisian's work has been featured in many international exhibitions and festivals, including the Istanbul Biennial in Turkey, the Vidarte Festival in Mexico City, the Whitney Biennial in New York, and the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland.
In 2008 the University of Wyoming Art Museum organized an extensive mid-career retrospective of Sarkisian’s work that traveled to numerous venues throughout the world, including the Knoxville Museum of Art, the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. In April of 2014, the Orange County Museum of Art opened it's own retrospective exhibition of Sarkisian's work, curated by Dan Cameron.