About the Artist
Rah Gerg is a mixed-media painter who creates immersive collage works with an emphasis in papermaking to portray natural and supernatural queer kinships. Their practice spans sculpture, textile, print, installation, and papermaking often involving tactile and interactive components. Working with category-defiant materials, Rah’s practice welcomes collaboration and insists on interaction through tactility, and a beckoning relationship to the body.
Rah works as an artist-educator, curator, and muralist based in Philadelphia, and received their BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 2024. They attended the Dumfries House Artist Residency in Scotland, as well as a workshop at Anderson Ranch Art Center in Colorado in 2024. They have shown art and worked on murals in Madison (WI), Providence (RI), and Philadelphia (PA). They hope to work with artist collectives to engage in radical collaborative artmaking, installations, and curatorial projects. Rah works with the Philadelphia Free Library in youth programming, and at the West Philly Tool Library. These community driven roles inspired their new project– a lending library of sentimental objects. These treasures will drive a new body of work surrounding hidden feelings, mapped symbology, secret language, and modularity.
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Artist Statement
I am a trans mixed-media painter and collage artist who uses handmade paper, paper-pulp, rope, paper-mache, assemblage, and costume-making to placate my innate need to transform, reconfigure, and play with materials. My studio is a desire-seeking crucible: my paintings are relational beings which remain tethered to whims. They beckon, repulse, mimic, and decay. As surfaces are rearranged and undergo metamorphosis, they are constantly subjected to new encounters and ecologies. This process of forming images and meaning only to be ripped apart exudes queer malleability. Whether it is bodily transformation or narrative shifting, the act of alteration allows for new forms of empowerment.
My twisting works contain symbology drawn from nature, fantasy, found objects, curiosities, and personal experiences. Common protagonists include gargoyles, lycanthropy, fishing nets, nests and cocoons, hybrids, and my loved ones.Through invitational installations of paintings and objects, I replicate the transformative immersion of my studio for viewers. I hope my work tugs at an audience’s peripheral vision– causing them to wander closer, touch, and feel, while imagining otherworldly possibilities. I received my BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 2024, and work as an artist, muralist, arts-educator, and curator in Philadelphia.
Below: various studio views between 2021-2024.
Artist Statement (long, rambling rendition)
A bird is born with ingrained knowledge of nest building. It knows which twigs, fluff, and twigs to gather and how to tenderly arrange them. It knows to pluck feathers from the center of its chest to create an immense heat for incubating its brood. Intuition and trust guides my practice. After a month of careful observation, an incubating piece will be flipped in every direction, and lovingly nested in relationship to many drawings and fragments of writing, it will be ready to hatch. This hatching is accompanied by gathering materials and bits of supportive reading and looking.
The studio is a flurry of activity, with many sites of becoming strewn about. Curated in its clutter, drawings compose each other and material experiments invigorate in an invitational web. As I move between sculptural, textile, print, and installation based processes, I find strength in multiplicity and breadth.
They are organic, bodily environments, and fully living scenes. My studio often appears as an ecosystem of drawings, with books scattered about which feature my favorite painters, internal anatomy, and images printed from my explorations outdoors. I am often inspired by the landscapes I’ve lived in, and push the psychological connotations a landscape can possess to their most potent limits. I employ color vividly, creating harmonized fields which you can wander into and find yourself lost in. With my works, I hope to grant the viewer the same sort of wanderlust and curiosity that fuels my making of the works.
My working space is a great webbed interlacement, where processes and found materials become swaddled into ongoing ‘open’ surfaces and metamorphosing drawings are amassed. Here, I am a spider of sorts.
Then, they are digested: torn, cut, overlaid, pulped, or otherwise intercepted.
For many years, I’ve been a collector of sticks, rocks, bits of detritus marking the path of people before, and more. These artifacts are guides for my practice, acting as important material touchstones to bring into my work and connect myself to the people and places where I first encountered them. I’m interested in what we physically surround ourselves with to create a boundary of safety, comfort, and familiarity between us and the more tumultuous world at large. Much as a bird intuitively collects material for its nest, I find myself drawn to disregarded relics which ground my curiosity, weaving themselves into my studio and each artwork.
I find power and potency in animal kinship, as their likeness and spirit infuse each body of work with symbolism and emotional resonance. Over the last four years, these studio companions have included fish tethered in nets, murmurations of twinkling starlings, insectoid metamorphosis and sheddings of skin and shell, the maternal doe, the hope-infused living-fossil of the passenger pigeon, and the hybrid, resistant werewolf. I find a glimmering queer power in expressing these guiding entities through my intuitive and inventive painting process.
I avoid ascribing specific intentions for a project in terms of material engagement or composition before beginning. Instead, those decisions are better made in collaboration with the changing surface. Given autonomy, patience, and space, the material asks for what it needs. Therefore, each piece that becomes autonomous and leaves the nest is embedded with the history, insights, and remnants of the entire studio. Removing them from the innards of the studio space is the precarious moment of a bird attempting flight for the first time: fluttering ferociously, and with bravery, it takes on a life of its own.
Music, feelings, poetry, theory, and personal experiences all mingle and calibrate each other in my studio: collaboration between artists, thinkers, and materials is at the forefront. Far too often we are taught perfectionist tendencies, in the form of replicable, algorithmic, and productive turnaround, are the necessary means of being an artist. This capitalist mode of production does not leave space for strange, queer, boundary-rippling modes of making which foreground continuous risk-taking, This kind of destabilized practice welcomes ‘failure’ products, in favor of more expansive learning along the way.
