Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1988 and moving many times through various tract house suburbs, Peter Croteau understands the differences and similarities in the landscape across the United States. He considers himself to be an explorer of mundane spaces looking to transform the everyday into something otherworldly through the use of 8×10 and 4×5 view cameras.

Peter Croteau’s Unnatural Wonders will be featured in the Griffin Museum’s Atelier Gallery at the Stoneham Theatre in Stoneham, MA, October 21 – January 8, 2015. It runs parallel to the theater’s productions of “The Addams Family Musical”, “Meet Me in St. Louis“, “New York Voices” and “Loretta Laroche.”

A reception is November 20, 2014 at 6:30-8:00 p.m.

Peter Croteau creates drosscapes. These are the in-between waste spaces in the landscape. They are formed as a result of sprawl and are in a constant state of flux between use and disuse. “Peter Croteau fashions mountains out of everyday mound hills like clay and salt piles and construction fill,” says Paula Tognarelli, executive director and curator of the Griffin Museum of Photography. “His landscapes are not what they appear to be at first glance. Through perspective and exacting optics, he manufactures a gallery of unnatural wonders.”

“I explore these mundane spaces using the camera as an apparatus that can reframe and order the world,” says Croteau. “I set up a dualistic relationship between earth and sky in order to reference painterly representations of the sublime.”

Peter Croteau received his MFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design in 2012 and his BS in Photography from Drexel University in 2010. He currently lives and works out of Providence, RI.