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Works by Gabriel Peralta
Frost Bank Gallery
Artist Statement
My work investigates the emergence of the individual self from ecological and social
entanglements, and reimagines animal/plant/material bodies as sites for collaborative
meaning-making. I build sculptural forms and installations as proxies for my emotional and
sensory experience of the world, then recontextualize them through the use of evocative
materials, drastic alteration, and transformation. A pig jawbone becomes the face of a
quasi-humanoid with melted plastic trash compressed into a suggestion of its exposed
organs. The steel figuration of a goat’s head remains forever separated from its body made
of conglomerate materials and skinned in brown paper.
Small figures, or “observers,” appear in my drawings whose contents they perceive through
looking, tasting, smelling, listening, or fully enmeshing themselves in the pictorial plane. They
exist as signifiers of the universe examining our world and our choices through us, although
one could simultaneously interpret them as the subconscious or some external intelligence.
The “observers” operate as a counterpoint to my carefully balanced or composed
sculptures and drawings; they are as disinterested and systematic as they are curious and
haphazardly materialized through their markings.
Decentering any singular authorship of my perspective opens my process to the
possibilities inherent in other vantage points. I intentionally embrace ambiguity and
uncertainty as generative conditions in my work. By destabilizing hierarchies that privilege
certain materials over others, I create space for new relational modalities to emerge. I
subvert conventional notions of value by combining “quality” materials such as tempered
metal or hardwood with “base” materials such as foam, high fructose corn syrup candy, or
mycelial growth, allowing them equal agency in my creative process. This approach borrows
from strategies of mimicry in which certain organisms, plant or animal, appropriate
recognizable signifiers for purposes of camouflage or warning. In this way, mimicry
destabilizes ownership of those signifiers even as they reinforce ecological balance.
Artist Bio
Gabriel Peralta is a multidisciplinary artist and writer whose work explores the emergence
of the individual self from ecological and social entanglements. Their sculpture practice
appropriates the visual language of subjugation and sadomasochism as power mechanisms
within capitalism, and uses it to reimagine animal/plant/material bodies as sites for
collaborative meaning-making and liberation. Gabriel received their MFA in Sculpture and a
graduate certificate in Biotechnology from Texas Tech University (2024), and their BFA in
Sculpture and Ceramics from The Southwest School of Art (2021). Their work has been
exhibited in multiple galleries across Texas and in the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art.
They have been Artist in Residence at the Tablelands Bioregional Center for Art (TX) in
2022 and the Elsewhere Studios Residency (CO) in 2023.
Spill
2024
Steel, pig jawbone, polyurethane foam, exercise mat, basswood, tool dip, vinyl, gum wrappers, ear foams, bloody bandage, magnets, extension cord plug, oil pastel, epoxy clay, leather, acrylic paint,
beeswax, pigeon feathers, house flies
55 x 38 x 28 in.