INTERPLAY

Curated by Angelica Fuentes

Artists: Marianna Peragallo

December 2019

INTERPLAY is a solo exhibition featuring the work of New York-based artist Marianna Peragallo that affirms the intersection of playwork and contemporary art through a series of emotively interactive installations. The primary role of the playworker is to support the process of play, much like the role of the curator in supporting the process of creation. Together each role explores ideas, materials, and possibilities. Through play, we learn about ourselves and the world around us. It enables us to test boundaries, explore our environments, and be present in them. Play is a universal process and language that informs our adult worlds, it is how we learn (or mislearn) codes of conduct. INTERPLAY encourages the notion of play as a set of behaviors that are freely chosen, personally directed, and intrinsically motivated. It is an invitation to move through a space with one’s own impulse and take play seriously.

For INTERPLAY Peragallo has created a series of opportunities for play in conversation with the Playwork Principles: a set of ethics established by the Playwork Principles Scrutiny Group and found in The Playwork Primer, a text by Penny Wilson that outlines the history and ideologies of playwork and its practical applications. Her recent works deliberate the cross-sections of love, endurance, vulnerability, and joy to create opportunities for emotional connection within an empathetic space. INTERPLAY asks us to consider physical and emotional limitations and how they intersect, in an effort to subvert notions of play as frivolous. Instead, the framework of play can be used to think critically about emotive qualities, communications, and consequences. Here humor and play can create a communal space for vulnerability and connection.