Feia is thrilled to present Good Luck Out There, Marianna Peragallo’s debut exhibition with the gallery. With this body of work, the São Paulo-born, New York City-based artist turns a microscope on the overlooked moments of urban life, constructing vignettes that are at once whimsical and emotionally charged, threaded with humor and tinged with malaise. Good Luck Out There highlights Peragallo’s evolving ceramic practice while reintroducing mixed media and video. Individual tiles become miniature stages, their surfaces evoking the brick facades, utility boxes, and chain-link fences that accumulate the collective memories of city life. Tagged, vandalized, and weathered, these objects bear the marks of time and use, becoming repositories for fragments of a shared past.
In Peragallo’s own words, “These sculptures grew out of routine morning walks with my infant and dog. My dog smells every square inch of our five-block radius, giving me plenty of time to look carefully. I found that people have left so much to discover: notes scratched into concrete, signs on fences, lost belongings, and ads. These artifacts speak to me; sometimes judging me, sometimes offering up a gift or a funny gesture, and at other times meeting me in grief and offering understanding. Since Motherhood has heightened my awareness of the labor of attention – for making space for things that might otherwise go unseen – I’m endlessly grateful for the small moments of noticing”
Peragallo is deeply attuned to the objects that drift through everyday life: plastic bags floating down sidewalks like ghosts caught in a breeze, rubber kitchen gloves abandoned after a life well lived, knotted flowers tucked into neglected corners, torn flyers bearing the traces of hopeful hands, and caution tape tangled in chain-link fences, its warning long outlived. In Peragallo’s hands, these discarded remnants become a cast of misfits, with distinct personalities and stories, for are permitted to misbehave, resist, rest, and assume new roles.
In Good Luck Out There, a sagging takeout bag might now cry softly into itself, transforming a vessel of discard into an object of contemplation. Rubber gloves recall the tenderness of her grandmother’s hands, offering a quiet reassurance that everything will be okay. Locks and chains, meanwhile, evoke the boundaries between inside and outside, opening onto questions of otherness, identity, and community. Together, these encounters compose a day in the life – a portrait of urban existence that meets the world’s absurdities and uncertainties.
Beneath this attention to the everyday, Peragallo’s work traces her own experience as an immigrant navigating the in-between. Her objects occupy transitional spaces, existing among us yet remaining somehow apart, carrying private histories while participating in the broader life of the city. Good Luck Out There holds these tensions in view, while drawing us closer to the intimate, often contradictory experiences that shape our lives.
