#22: August 22, 2025

On Peter Helinski's "Shiny Things" at Left Field Gallery
​By Benjamin Terrell

Peter Helinski's work at Left Field Gallery
Los Osos, CA
​August, 2025

Your Foop was a sad and angry man, she said, buttering a piece of toast just warmed by the toaster, and boom- I didn’t even know I was flying until I saw the wind bend the tops of the trees. The booklet that came with the packaging said anything worth doing was bound to be awkward for the first few thousand years. But we can’t stop now, I can almost taste the moon, or is that sulfur something on the surface of Mars? So you know, I didn’t just grease the wheel; I lit it up like a Ferris wheel. You said you wanted a death rattle? Here, hold my maracas. I’m a mute poet, another dead rock star, for better or worse I am yet another man’s name chiseled in marble.

​They say the way to a man’s stomach is through his heart disease. No, really, they put a little tube in there and they can see everything. They can even tell you what you had for breakfast. Everything I seem to read now is about the absurdity of man, Stan, the crisis in men, Ben. We are drowning in our thoughts of what everybody else is thinking. The long, long hard fall of Pete-triarchy smells like roast beef and antiquity. The quiet nonexistent struggle of certain people getting exactly what they wanted. Smug and snug as tight trousers pinching on a park bench.

We put bait in plastic dairy containers. We put fireflies in tiny glass jam jars. We saved bacon fat in old coffee cans. We even painted colorful stripes on wood dowels so we’d know the rank of everyone we enlisted. The grass skirts on some of the totems blankets busted hoses, that or they are straw mustaches covering upper lips that quiver in the face of danger. Striped dynamite or plugs for powder kegs? Impotent and ornery as termite tracks, Gauguin carved women into the wood to throw into the ocean to dissolve like bath tablets. The east and west winds meet and ask each other, what would a boat (and thus a man) be if not for the invention of anchors?

Wood, pulp, then paper. I wrote down records of our existence together to share with you one day but then paper, the palette for my thoughts and the container for our data, disappeared. Information now floats like ghosts in inboxes, suspended on social media profiles with the dense energy of clouded human externalization. The physicality given to critical thinking is easily rerouted toward desire, leaving facts weakened and as debatable as cave drawings without a cave wall. I am defined instead by what is left on my doorstep and what petitions my mailbox, stuffed (with) padded envelopes and endless cardboard boxes. Am I as infinite as the repeated expectation I always have when receiving an oversized box?

But alas, desire deceives like discarded cardboard and forgotten plywood. Look again, a box folds out as an altar to an ordinary icon, a block of wood is a marker to life ripened by reinvention. I can only somewhat imagine eternity because of the repetition of my human fallibility. And thus, I am found forever etched on the surfaces of both me and a million other men. Chuck of the Pear, Tom of the Lemon, Cherries Greg, Pear Bud, Wilted Joe Flower and Dead Daisy Earle. Eternally profiled like heads on currency of debatable value. Not dissimilar to old portraits of men with big collars, like in Rembrandt’s The Night Watch- we are flecks on giant windows of social structures beyond the comprehension of one lifetime.
​
Benjamin Terrell 
8/7/2025

For a complete list of Peter Helinski's work from the show,
please contact Left Field Gallery.

You can also find more of Helinski's work:
     - on instagram: @peterhelinski
     - at 57W57ARTS in NY, NY