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:
After earning my M.F.A. from Rutgers University, I completed an Asian Cultural Council fellowship for research and production of new work in India. I’ve presented solo shows at Chitrakala Parishath College of Art (Bangalore, India) as well as NURTUREart and A.I.R. Gallery (both in Brooklyn), ArtBloc and Casa Colombo (Jersey City). Awards include a public sculpture commission from the Randall’s Island Park Alliance in NYC, the Bronx Museum’s Artist-In-the-Marketplace Program, and the Foundation for Contemporary Art’s Emergency Grant.
My work will be shown at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at St. Louis in 2025 and has previously appeared nationally at venues such as the Anchorage Museum (Alaska), Wave Hill (Bronx, NY), the Islip Arts Museum (Long Island), and the U.S. Botanical Garden (Washington D.C.) and internationally in India, Italy, Germany, Chile, the Netherlands, and Estonia.
Photo by Suzy Gorman.