Artist Registry
The White Columns Curated Artist Registry is an online platform for emerging and under-recognized artists to share images and information about their respective practices. The Registry seeks to create a context for artists who have yet to benefit from wider critical, curatorial or commercial support. To be eligible, artists cannot be affiliated with a commercial gallery in New York City.
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STATEMENT OF WORK
Marianna Peragallo’s anthropomorphic sculptures re-imagine everyday objects designed for human consumption or disposal. She creates sculptures of objects like garbage bags, plastic shopping bags, rubber cleaning gloves, and cut flowers, but makes them humorously misbehave or subvert their assigned roles.
The sculptures pull from her surroundings in New York City and her native São Paulo, Brazil. For example, plastic bags are NYC tumbleweeds and ubiquitous in the landscape. They carry our stuff (takeout, groceries, trash, dog poop) and thank us incessantly for our business. They scoot down sidewalks helplessly with gusts of wind, handles flailing like arms. The bags are icons of over-consumption, capitalism, and disposability.
These objects also hold personal narratives, melding Marianna’s tongue-in-cheek humour, grief, melancholy, queerness, and hope. When she started paying attention to the disposable items around her, they reflected familiar experiences, like feeling overworked, overlooked, playful, etc.
Some of the sculptures are containers for plants, making us collaborators in sustaining new life and shifting the dynamic from consumption to care. Each sculpture speaks to the potential for attention, care, and love for even the most peripheral things.