Biography
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"Reimagining Arte Povera for the Anthropocene, Percoco utilizes discarded materials and abandoned spaces in the built environment often regarded as worthless. But to her, it is precisely because these materials and places are overlooked that allow them to accumulate possibilities otherwise absent in traditional white box art. More than assemblages of society’s flotsam and jetsam, Percoco’s excavatory work reveals obscured layers of meaning beneath the rubble of commercialism, creating a complex lens through which to view the inherent interconnection between the human and natural worlds." -- Lorissa Rinehart, Art and Object
ARTIST STATEMENT:
As a sculptor, I recontextualize existing elements: presentation rather than representation. My process is resourceful, responsive, and playful. I spend as much time researching, exploring sites, and scavenging for materials as I do making.
I often work with junk and junk-spaces: materials and places that are overlooked, untended, and thus host to numerous extraordinary possibilities; places where artifacts accumulate, weeds grow, and history is most visible. My work traces the edges between nature and culture, where both spontaneous and human-shaped ecologies interact.
I produce public interventions, work for traditional gallery settings, web-based projects, and publications. I learn different things from each way of working.
What's at stake for me is keeping alive a sense of wonder or empathy in an extractive world and making space for slower, more reciprocal relationships with materials and environments.
In addition to maintaining my own art practice, I co-founded the Next Epoch Seed Library with Ellie Irons. NESL's collection and activities are dedicated to weeds: those self-seeded plants that thrive in environments heavily impacted by humans. These plants are our indispensable companions as we inhabit novel ecosystems and navigate climate chaos together. Through workshops, seed-swaps, exhibitions, and publications, NESL invites people to notice and learn from the resilient ecologies that surround us.
BIOGRAPHY:
Anne Percoco is a sculptor and interdisciplinary artist based in Jersey City, NJ. Her work spans public intervention, installation, and artists' books and zines, and has been presented at venues across the United States, including the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Anchorage Museum, Queens Museum, and the U.S. Botanical Garden, and internationally across Europe and India, where she completed an Asian Cultural Council fellowship. Her work has been covered in Hyperallergic, the Washington Post, and Domus, among other publications. She holds an M.F.A. from Rutgers University.
Photo by Suzy Gorman.