Serena Perrone
Sideroads in Stereoscope (looping animated gif, duration variable, 2020) combines imagery of Iceland and Sicily in side-by-side landscapes. The title borrows from the book of poetry Sideroads by the late Icelandic poet Jonas Thorbjarnarson who died in Italy in 2012. The looping gif consists of close to 200 postage-stamp sized, toned cyanotypes of the Icelandic and Sicilian landscape that bear uncanny resemblances to one another. Often shot by the artist through the windows of moving cars or while walking in remote areas like lava tubes, basalt caves and rocky beaches, these quickly-framed images are presented side-by side as if they were two views of the same scene from slightly different perspectives, as would be done to create a stereoscope, a photographic effect that fools the eye into superimposing two scenes, resulting in the sensation of seeing an image in 3-D. The flickering pace, distortion and small scale assist in putting the focus on the similarity of the forms rather than the details of the two landscapes, which, devoid of their natural colors, could be confused one for the other. This mimics the sensations of dislocation experienced by the artist during an intense sequence of consecutive trips between the two volcanic terrains in a single year.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Serena Perrone (b. St. Louis, MO) is a dual US/Italian citizen currently based between Atlanta Georgia and Sicily. She received her M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design and is Associate Professor of Printmaking at Georgia State University. Her work is included in numerous permanent collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, and Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Perrone was selected by the Georgia Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts for the 2026 edition of Women to Watch, an exhibition curated by Cynthia Nourse Thompson to take place at the Atlanta Contemporary in early 2026. Previously, she received grants from South Arts, Idea Capital, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and was nominated for the prestigious Pew Fellowship in Philadelphia in 2017.
She is the Founder and Director of Officina Stamperia del Notaio, an international multidisciplinary artists’ residency program in Sicily. She is a member of the artist collective Progetto Vicinanze (Italy), Ground Floor Contemporary in Birmingham Alabama, and her work is represented by Cade Tompkins Projects in Providence, Rhode Island.