Other Tongues: Gabriel Peralta

Opening Date: July 5, 2024
Closing Date: August 10, 2024
Reception: July 5, 2024, 6:00 – 9:00 pm

Exhibition: Other Tongues

Artist: Gabriel Peralta

Venue: Arts Fort Worth

Fort Worth Community Arts Center

1300 Gendy Street, Fort Worth, Texas 76107

Gabriel Peralta’s 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. They build sculptural forms and installations as proxies for their 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 Peralta’s 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 Peralta’s perspective opens my process to the possibilities inherent in other vantage points. They intentionally embrace ambiguity and uncertainty as generative conditions in their work. By destabilizing hierarchies that privilege certain materials over others, they create space for new relational modalities to emerge. Subverting 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 the 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.

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.