As students and faculty are returning from spring break, the Department of Art and Art History is presenting Bricks (I’d Like to Build a Shelter), an art exhibition by office coordinator Marissa Klee-Peregon.

The show will be on view in the Light Fine Arts Gallery through Friday, April 4, with gallery hours from 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 10 a.m.–2 p.m. Friday and Saturday. There will also be an artist talk, with a reception to follow, at 4:15 p.m. on Thursday, April 3.

In the ongoing project, Klee-Peregon sews bricks out of satin and then uses the soft bricks for interventions, installations and performances in the built environment. This project addresses moments of failure and collapse within both social and physical structures; the labor by which those structures are built, maintained and repaired; gendered labor and gender in general; and the desire to hide, safe and comfortable, among that which is beautiful and soft. The exhibition includes a selection of images, objects and videos produced as a part of the project.

“I’m less interested in communicating a specific message than I am in posing questions which I hope viewers will continue to ponder after the show,” Klee-Peregon said. “The questions I want to present are something like, ‘What are the structures of our world—both physical and social—built out of,’ ‘Who built them and how,’ and ‘Who gets to shelter inside those structures and who is left in the cold?’ I’m not trying to answer those questions with my work, but I am trying to suggest that the answers—whatever they may be—will be complicated, contextual, and likely contradictory.”

Klee-Peregon has a bachelor’s degree in art history and studio art from Wellesley College. Support for their project was provided by the Kalamazoo Artistic Directive Initiative, a program of the Arts Council of Greater Kalamazoo.