“In Cleon Peterson’s DAYBREAK, shadowy figures mete out violence in images that could just as well depict justice as they do barbarity. DAYBREAK can be viewed as both a continuation and a progression of Peterson’s past works, in which graphically rendered scenes of sadism portray chaos as the inevitable order of things. Many of those scenes have featured characters with physical appearances largely undifferentiated from one another, suggesting a classless unsympathetic society, yet in this new body of work Peterson incorporates “shadow” figures and a new dichotomous order. There are haves and have-nots, but amid the havoc it’s hard to decide who’s who.
The exhibition draws inspiration and its title from Nietzsche’s Daybreak: Reflections on Moral Prejudices. Like Nietzsche, Peterson presents a world in which contrasting schemes of morality result in eruptive hostility between social classes. In Nietzsche’s work, this dichotomy is described as master-slave morality: the tension between an overclass that values pride, wealth and strength and an underclass that values humility, piety and restraint. While Nietzsche claims that the people of the underclass choose this morality to soothe the cognitive dissonance of hegemony, Peterson’s DAYBREAK insinuates that through violence they are breaking free not only from their oppressors but an oppressive morality as well. This role reversal, however, creates an interesting dilemma: when a revolt upends the power structure, which sides do virtue and vice end up on? Can either class be considered virtuous if they literally beat the other to death with morals?”
