Welcome to Pearl Renken

My instinctive proclivity for thrift stores, antiques, and rummage sales has always seemed to be innately engrained in me. The envision of peace materializes every time I submerge into a world of discarded debris, and salvageable scraps. I am immediately immersed into the endless possibilities of conceptualizing an object’s transformation. I find myself consistently confounded on how another’s perception of these same objects. The abundance of nostalgia reminds me of moments throughout life’s metamorphosis. Shaped by these memories, consuming us in layers, we all have a story to tell.In therapy, you peel back the layers, clean them out and grow new ones. My process has always been about nostalgia and layers. Whether I am stripping them away by sanding or building them up in a collage, it is all layers. Through the combined language of painting, collaging and sculpting, I explore our emotional relationships to personal hoarded objects and challenge inherited ideologies. I rework the old materials into a contemporary context, forcing them to aid in the rewriting of the narrative. As a human, we struggle to live in the moment and some spend too much time not minding their own business. I aim  to fill the gaps where folks were simply “left out”, creating space and representation. In my work, I want to encompass all types of love and all kinds of people. Painting subjects in a classical/dismissive way, I am calling upon the viewer to not have “snap judgements” but rather to see the materiality of the work , draw upon their own memories and give space for the subjects to exist