JHB Gallery is pleased to continue its collaboration with Jetsam Studio in Southampton, Long Island with a special exhibition by New York artist Jaanika Peerna including 'The Wings of Desire', a new site-specific wall installation.
Peerna works across drawing, performance and installation platforms. Her exhibition at Jetsam will also include framed drawings and photographs from her recent 'March Solace' series.
Central to the artist’s practice is an expanded conception of drawing that engages the rhythms and movements of the body in broad gestural mark making. Working with the semi-translucent material of mylar, Peerna's drawn lines are often altered and erased by the application of water and ice, manipulated, like her drawing materials, with two hands in whole-body movements. Her wall installations add new layers to this process, the mylar drawings sliced, twisted, and spun out in sensual arrangements that cascade across the gallery wall. And debuting at Jetsam will be works from the artist’s 'March Solace' series; born of a reflective period of isolation at her studio during the first lockdown of 2020, Peerna here uses photographs of her wall works—and their elaborate shadow play—as the starting point for further gestural drawing work.
Layered and complex, and often drawing on the artist’s deeply held engagement with the climate crisis (particularly the loss of sea ice), Peerna channels personal energies and motivations into powerful work in which sculpture, line, form, and shadow flux and flow together as one cathartic whole.
Jaanika Peerna was born in Tallinn, Estonia, and received an MFA from SUNY New Paltz, NY. Her solo exhibitions and performances have been presented at galleries internationally including Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT; Espronceda Center for Art and Culture, Barcelona, Spain; SG Gallery, Venice, Italy; and Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, SUNY New Paltz, NY. The artist lives and works in upstate New York.
This summer will mark the second year of JHB Gallery’s exhibition program at Jetsam Studio, the Southampton atelier founded by designer Quinn Pofahl showcasing modern and contemporary furniture and design. The collaboration has provided a unique space for the promotion of creative discourse across fine art, design, and the decorative arts. Alongside our presentation of new work by Jaanika Peerna, our forthcoming installation will include new paintings by John Noestheden and Mark Saltz, 'Water Glass' photographs by Amanda Means, and 'Suryagrams' from Scott Morgan's recent 10,000 Years project among others.
