DVAA Member since 2025
Rah Gerg
WEBsite: rahgerg.art
About:
Rah Gerg is a mixed-media painter who creates immersive collage works with an emphasis in papermaking to portray natural and supernatural queer kinships. Their practice spans sculpture, textile, print, installation, and papermaking often involving tactile and interactive components. Working with category-defiant materials, Rah’s practice welcomes collaboration and insists on interaction through tactility, and a beckoning relationship to the body.
Rah works as an artist-educator, curator, muralist, and poet based in Philadelphia, and received their BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 2024. They attended the Dumfries House Artist Residency in Scotland, as well as a workshop at Anderson Ranch Art Center in Colorado in 2024. They have shown art and worked on murals in Madison (WI), Providence (RI), and Philadelphia (PA). They hope to work with artist collectives to engage in radical collaborative artmaking, installations, and curatorial projects. Rah works with the Philadelphia Free Library in youth programming, and at the West Philly Tool Library. These community driven roles inspired their new project– a lending library of sentimental objects. These treasures will drive a new body of work surrounding hidden feelings, mapped symbology, secret language, and modularity.
Artist Statement:
I am a trans mixed-media painter and collage artist who uses handmade paper, paper-pulp, rope, paper-mache, assemblage, and costume-making to placate my innate need to transform, reconfigure, and play with materials. My studio is a desire-seeking crucible:
my paintings are relational beings which remain tethered to whims. They beckon, repulse, mimic, and decay. As surfaces are rearranged and undergo metamorphosis, they are constantly subjected to new encounters and ecologies. This process of forming images and meaning only to be ripped apart exudes queer malleability. Whether it is bodily transformation or narrative shifting, the act of alteration allows for new forms of empowerment.
My twisting works contain symbology drawn from nature, fantasy, found objects, curiosities, and personal experiences. Common protagonists include gargoyles, lycanthropy, fishing nets, nests and cocoons, hybrids, and my loved ones.Through invitational installations of paintings and objects, I replicate the transformative immersion of my studio for viewers. I hope my work tugs at an audience’s peripheral vision– causing them to wander closer, touch, and feel, while imagining otherworldly possibilities. I received my BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 2024, and work as an artist, muralist, arts-educator, and curator in Philadelphia.
IN ADDITION
I am always open to collaborations, studio visits, material workshops, and curatorial projects. Feel free to reach out to me at my email rah@rahgerg.art or over instagram @rah_paints
