Ari Zuaro

MFA Ceramics, 2025

From the traces of things built and found, my work points to how we might reconfigure or string together new ways of being from that which has been undervalued or disregarded. On my walks through Philadelphia’s Chinatown, I began to consider the definition of reflection: the bouncing back of a body without absorption. While I cruise the city the streets I wonder how we might locate the edges of a site? 

Through the use of projection and collage, I build layers of texture, sound and light. Using discarded construction materials, I arrange and assemble fragments. This “an-architectural” approach leans into the nature of collapse. I seek to capture the urgency–and reframe the messiness–of existing in a place. Collapse becomes a means to engage in trans-ness. By this, I refer not simply to gender identity but instead situating in between, and existing as possibility. It may be that at any given time we are only glimpsing each other in the various states of our collective becoming.