The resiliency of New Orleans and urban landscapes around the world is a guiding theme of Sibylle Peretti’s fifth solo exhibition at Callan Contemporary, Alluvial Land—Where Diamonds Grow. In a suite of poetic mixed-media wall reliefs and glass sculptures, the artist imagines a city after a flood, where minerals, gemstones, crystals and glittering beads have washed up along the alluvial plain. With a nod to the genre of magical realism, she depicts animals and hybrid plants joining together to rebuild a reinvented and fertile habitat using artifacts left behind. This utopian, mythical world is reimagined through the harmonious coexistence of horses, coyotes, hares, bobcats and plants-protagonists in a metaphoric narrative of healing and hope.

The artworks are composed of kiln-formed and cast glass and reverse-carved Plexiglas, combining multi-layered painting, drawing, engraving, silvering and photography. Many began with photographs Peretti took across the Mississippi River from her studio in the Bywater neighborhood. The materiality of glass adds a seductive quality, especially to opaline glass and the magical ancient medium of ruby red glass. “The layering of opaline densities,” she explains, “gives me the opportunity to create a subtle, but almost infinite range of whites, pinks and blues, which lend my works a sky-like expansiveness.”

Born in Germany, Peretti became a Master of Glass Making and Design at the State School for Glass in Zwiesel, later earning her Masters in Painting and Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cologne, Germany. Her works are included in the permanent collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art, Corning Museum of Glass, Hunter Museum of American Art, Speed Art Museum, Toledo Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, Shanghai Museum of Glass and Huntsville Museum of Art, among many other public and private collections.The recipient of grants from the Pollock-Krasner and Joan Mitchel Foundations as well as a United Artists Fellowship, she was the subject of the 2018 solo exhibition Promise and Perception: The Enchanted Landscapes of Sibylle Peretti at the Chrysler Museum of Art. She is currently preparing for an exhibition to open next year at the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass.

Peretti’s works embody a dream-like atmosphere of enchantment and serenity. They are multi-layered, both in materials and in their strata of symbolic meaning. The exhibition at Callan Contemporary envisions a more sustainable environment, where the challenges that face New Orleans and other places are met with spirit of possibility and renewal. “I wanted to create a landscape that is magical,” she reflects, “where you discover the essence of transformation in a reimagined world.”

- by Richard Speer