Mia Pearlman: INSIDE/OUTSIDE
April 3 - May 21, 2025

Mia Pearlman is known for her dynamic, site specific cut paper installations and large-scale permanent public commissions, found from NY to Massachusetts, Florida and China. 

INSIDE/OUTSIDE brings together her latest studio work with a site specific installation that acts as a retrospective of Pearlman’s public art practice. Facing each other across FXCollaborative Gallery, these two bodies of work reveal how they have influenced and informed each other over time.

“The World Below the Brine” is a new series of wall sculptures that includes tumultuous mixed media sculptures and intimate paper works mounted on wood. Both are inspired by two 19th century greats: Walt Whitman’s poem of the same title, and the surreal ukiyo-e woodblock prints of Utagawa Kuniyoshi depicting samurai battles in and with the sea. 

This body of work grew out of an unrealized suspended sculpture commission for a San Diego biotech building, which would have been fabricated from UV printed aluminum in colors evoking the nearby Pacific. The project was shelved, but Pearlman was freed to translate that more restrained vision into turbulent wall sculptures responding to garbage gyres in the earth's oceans.

These new sculptures are made of painted and cut paper and “ghost gear,” fishing nets and rope salvaged from the Atlantic Ocean that trap and kill marine animals decades after fishing expeditions end. They evoke the drama and brutality of plastic’s invisible war on life “below the brine.”

The six paper works mounted on wood appear to be sliced out of an imaginary ocean, or paintings that have burst forth from two dimensional space. Abstractly evoking water yet slyly unnatural, their movement and scale draw viewers into their depths.

Facing these works is a site specific installation that incorporates images of Pearlman's works in the public realm with behind-the-scenes photos, scale models and contemporaneous artworks. An artwork in itself, the installation reveals the creative and logistical processes required to make large public commissions with insight and humor.

Since 2013, Pearlman has created permanent site specific public commissions for clients including Liberty Mutual Insurance, MGM, MTA Arts & Design, Baptist Health and Zhongshan Huafa Plaza, with budgets ranging from $175,000 to $1.2M. She has been a finalist for many projects from $350,000 to $2M for NYU Langone Hospital, Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, Oxford Properties, and many others. 

INSIDE/OUTSIDE reveals the creative connections between radically different scales and methodologies within Pearlman’s work, and her constant drive to dream up and execute ambitious ideas in a variety of materials.

“The World Below the Brine” by Walt Whitman

The world below the brine,
Forests at the bottom of the sea, the branches and leaves,
Sea-lettuce, vast lichens, strange flowers and seeds, the thick tangle, openings, and pink turf,
Different colors, pale gray and green, purple, white, and gold, the play of light through the water,
Dumb swimmers there among the rocks, coral, gluten, grass, rushes, and the aliment of the swimmers,
Sluggish existences grazing there suspended, or slowly crawling close to the bottom,
The sperm-whale at the surface blowing air and spray, or disporting with his flukes,
The leaden-eyed shark, the walrus, the turtle, the hairy sea-leopard, and the sting-ray,
Passions there, wars, pursuits, tribes, sight in those ocean-depths, breathing that thick-breathing air, as so many do,
The change thence to the sight here, and to the subtle air breathed by beings like us who walk this sphere,
The change onward from ours to that of beings who walk other spheres.