FLOW.13: Anne Percoco

The Project: New Growth

For New Growth, Percoco will integrate eight images of trees from local yellow pages advertisements into the real landscape on Randall’s Island Park. She envisions these as two-dimensional shapes, between 4’-7’ tall and 3’-4’ wide, installed along the Island’s southern end. The fake trees will provide similar benefits to Park visitors as real trees do: shade and aesthetic appeal. However, the use of chemically-treated wood for a sculpture of a tree is clearly ironic, using a similar conceptual mechanism as Magritte’s famous Treachery of Images, but adding another layer: the identity of the material. This project will call attention to the artifice of parks as some of the only “natural” settings one encounters in a city. As Robert Smithson wrote, “The authentic artist cannot turn his back on the contradictions that inhabit our landscape.”

The Artist: Anne Percoco

Anne Percoco makes art not by creating something new, but by reorganizing what’s already there. Her process is resourceful, responsive, and playful. She spends as much time exploring, collecting materials, and researching as she does making. She makes full use of each material’s unique formal properties as well as historical, cultural and environmental resonances. She makes both public and gallery-based work, learning different things from each. She studied at Drew University, Madison, NJ (BA 2005) and Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ (MFA 2008).