Talya Petrillo

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Recent Exhibition:

December 7, 2024 – January 18, 2025. Winter.

and spiral tines

Nyke Shen, Talya Petrillo, Chinning Liu, Emory Hall

Location: Reisig and Taylor Contemporary (4478 W Adams Blvd, Los Angeles, 90016).

Type: Group Exhibition.

Reference: Checklist.

Release: File.

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Bio

Talya Petrillo grew up outside of Detroit, in a multilingual household outside embroidered with combined practices of Islamic spiritualism and Catholic traditionalism. Her early navigation of a confluence of superstitions and storylines has deeply informed her foundational interests in the way archetypal signals and emotional narratives can be implicated in material, form and process. With frequent evocation of the body through scale, tactile material residues and organic structural nuance, her work unsettles the deeply personal with the surreal.

Working experimentally across disciplines, Petrillo received her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2020, and is a recipient of the Lea Simonds Fellowship, the William S. Dietrich II Presidential Fellowship, and the Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art at the frontier. She is currently based in Los Angeles, California.

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The sculptures presented arise from an evolving body of work that draws surreal and ambiguous inspiration from the industrial landscapes of concrete batching plants, oil refineries, pipelines, and their discrete structural elements. At their core, my sculptures explore forms that initially suggest functionality but, upon closer inspection, reveal themselves as inert and illusory—objects that merely mimic utility.

I like to work in a way that imposes my imprint on the object in question. Using my body as a measuring tool, nothing is level. I tend to use materials incorrectly, put things where they don’t go, and frequently spend days on a particular segment, just to sever, scratch, drill, squeeze and stomp into it. Emotional embodiment and the consequential error of (my)self becomes central to understanding the work, and also a guiding force in my personal discovery of a final form.

Eventually, through choosing to shape a blend of industrial influence and personal intervention, my sculptures bridge a boundary between perceived utility and raw emotional expression.

{Biographical text courtesy of the artist.}

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Exhibitions with the Gallery: