Savannah-based artist and SCAD painting professor Vanessa Platacis has announced her 2,700 sq. ft. painting installation Taking Place inside the newly renovated section of The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM). Platacis is the first female artist to have been commissioned for the size and complexity of this large-scale painting installation.

Vanessa Platacis began her career in Boston, MA under the pseudonym PIXNIT whose work was found on various buildings around Boston. Her painting style, combining graffiti and street art  with a distinctive stenciling technique, was guerrilla art designed to simultaneously beautify and to critique the uses and misuses of the urban environment. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions internationally including galleries in Boston, Cambridge, Los Angeles, Miami, New Mexico, and France as well as the Basel Art Fair in Switzerland. Platacis is a Professor of Painting at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Savannah, Georgia where she has taught a number of disciplines including painting, drawing, installation art and extended media.

Taking Place is a painting installation by Savannah-based artist, Vanessa Platacis, that reimagines some of PEM’s most beloved objects. The artist researched the museum’s vast and varied collections, diving deep to find unexpected connections across time, cultures, and materials. Platacis turned her findings into 210 canvas stencils—all drawn and cut by hand with X-Acto blades. After applying the stencils to the walls, she and her assistant used a variety of spray-paint and graffiti techniques, including drop shadows, high contrast, and layering, to apply color to the walls and give dimensionality and life to her forms. Organic forms and curvilinear lines emerged as unifying design motifs that speak to the natural world. As you move deeper into the galleries, floral forms give way to enchanting fauna and larger-than-life presentations of familiar and unexpected objects. Depending on the viewer’s location there are multiple compositions that emerge and allow for reflection on our relationship with material culture. Platacis’ labor-intensive contemporary approach to painting connects to the artistry and skill embedded within the historical objects in PEM’s collection, creating a fascinating interplay between artistic practice then and now.