Lightest of Matter

“I make drawings, videos and installations. My elements are line and light; my materials are pencils, vellum and video camera. I am a vessel gathering subtle and rapturous processes in nature, using the experiences and impulses to make my work.  I record mist turning into water.  I use slowly changing lights to cast shadows of mylar strips onto a wall—The slowness of shadows makes one wonder if there is any change at all.  I let wind move my body so that it leaves traces on paper. I swim through thousands of layers of gray air and mark each one down. Most of my work is born in the solitude of my studio. Sometimes public performances with musicians and dancers draw me out from the safe silence of my space and expand my drawing practice with sound and movement. I am interested in the never-ending process of becoming with no story, no beginning, no end—just the current moment in flux.” —Jaanika Peerna

"For with some drawing, the primacy of corporeal experience so central to phenomenology is not only its generative impulse but indeed its very subject. Such is the case with the work of Jaanika Peerna, the Estonian-born, New York–based artist whose protean drawing practice encompasses a broad range of media. Whether in her large-scale gesture drawings on Mylar that become expansive installations, her smaller sculptural pieces that become receptacles for delicate inscriptions of light or her videos and performances, at the core of Peerna’s work is a concern for the embodied, sensorially engaged subject in dynamic relation to the spatial and material world. By drawing attention to the evanescent, experiential qualities of light, shadow and movement, Peerna’s work operates with the subtle force of a slowly rising tide—first by awakening the senses, and then, gradually, by delivering insights only a mind deeply in touch with its body is prepared to receive."