Exhibition & performance

Year: 2019

Curated by David Borawski

Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT USA)

In the exhibition COLD LOVE, Peerna presents an interdisciplinary dialogue across various media including sculpture, performance and drawing. The works including, Screech of Ice Series, Tipping Point Series and Big Melt and Cold Love address distinct conceptions and ideologies about environmental transitions, and the shifting nature of the line itself.  Attention is drawn to the various site lines that are activated within the space, gesturing one singular form or line that reforms and recontextualizes within each medium. 

The works the Screech of Ice series, are dry not wet. Peerna takes a bundle of pencils into her hands and tries to become a human seismograph, letting the vibrations of the storms of information and outrage and memory of reading of the hurricanes, meltdowns and earthquakes of this world, feeling the damage and upheaval of the Earth’s own motion as that bodily shake leaves traces on the paper. They come from the various violent storms she lets rumble through her body. 

The medium-size Tipping Point series drawings are made by letting her body tip over the large sheets of mylar while leaving marks, eyes closed, with pigment pencil and later an eraser. 

The central piece of the exhibition is a 40 feet wide wall installation Cold Love made from about 40 drawings on Mylar that are hand cut inch by inch and assembled onto the wall module at the time. Multiple patterns emerge and submerge as the viewer is taking in the vast wavy field of nearly monochrome artwork—as if viewing a millions of years old glacier, both tough yet fragile.