In Practice: Magdalena Petroni

Magdalena Petroni’s practice delves into the subtext of popular visual language, drawing from media, branding, and online subcultures. Layering painting and sculpture, her works are often accumulated within immersive installations designed to envelop the visitor and dissolve boundaries between artworks. Petroni assembles dissimilar objects to explore the dynamism of social, technological, and sexual changes driven by capital, which she calls “a mixture of excitement and anxiety before a monstrous present.” For In Practice, she examines the glitched edges between the real and the hyperreal through a site-responsive environment that expands on her interest in liminality, perception, disorientation, and drift.

Over several weeks in New York, Petroni (who lives in Chile) built a hybrid movie set and office environment by reworking found materials. In 2020, the pandemic transformed labor and the office. In many cities, artists took over abandoned office spaces and turned them into studios. Petroni reconfigures the corporate workspace as an uncanny studio/stage to debut her first film, which she made from edited crash-test dummy videos. The dummies’ mundane, humorous, and surreal dialogue plays off the surroundings, capturing a sentiment of existential dread, entrapment, and acceleration.

In Practice: Magdalena Petroni is curated by Jovanna Venegas, Curator and Kyle Dancewicz, Deputy Director.