Untamed | Sibylle Peretti

The exhibition focuses on six new collaged, opaline glass wall panels depicting individual animals, a frequent subject of Peretti’s work, set in magical vignettes adorned with beads, crystals, feathers, ginger stalks and sunflowers. She combines altered and manipulated photographic prints or drawings on paper with the slumped and mirrored glass substrate making the pieces dimensional. The subtle layering of various opaline densities allows her to create a subtle, but almost infinite range of whites, pinks and blues, which lend even her most intimate pieces a sky-like expansiveness. Her chosen animals —a fox, a rabbit, a hawk— are the inhabitants of hinterlands, areas where encroaching civilization meets the wilderness, one of the front lines in the struggle for a better ecological and environmental balance. With this body of work Peretti poses questions about the fragile moment in our quest to stop the human degradation of the environment. Her works are an affirmation of life, represented by the animals she portrays, as well as a warning of the impending loss—societal & environmental—that she has witnessed in the industrial wastelands of her native Germany and the eroding and increasingly flooded lowlands of her adopted Louisiana home.