catia colagioia

catia colagioia (b. 2001) is an artist, researcher & musician born and raised and based in South Philadelphia, with a BA from the University of Pennsylvania in Fine Art. She has shown work across Philadelphia and has been recognized for her interdisciplinary, community-facing work. She is currently an artist member of Vox Populi Gallery.

Her process is rooted in her traversal of Philadelphia, in her collection and resurrection of found objects and memories, often likening organic forms in the cityscape to our bodies: both held tenuously, and subject to the encircling pressures of modern systems. There is a shifty logic applied to the objects she uses through her attempts to construct something physically unfamiliar yet already existent within the collective psyche. While her work possesses an uncanny, angelic quality, it also embodies the systems she references, and their by-products, shoddy barriers, and hypocriticalities. She applies care, repair, and automatism as methodologies, instinctually relating and tending closely to the desires of the objects she uses.

She is set on carrying the objects, (and by proxy, ourselves) past their (our) status as surplus matter, and into a new territory, where their (our) properties and histories empower them (us) to communicate in service of something larger.

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Click here to view my CV.

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Current exhibitions:

this too is a threshold, AUTOMAT, 11.1.25 - 11.29.25
opening reception: 11.13.25; 6-9 pm

Huddle, Vox Populi Gallery, 11.7.25 - 12.14.25
preview event: 11.5.25; 6-8 pm

Routine & Alchemy, Icebox Project Space, 11.18.25 - 11.23.25
curated by Logan Cryer

Upcoming exhibitions:

RESIST, Huddle Gallery. 11.21.25 - 11.23.25
opening reception: 11.21.25; 6-9 pm

Past exhibitions:

surplus, Vox Populi Gallery, 9.5.25 - 10.12.25
Low tech, Huddle Gallery, 3.13.25 - 3.25.25
stand/still, Charles Addams Gallery, 4.4.24 - 4.13.24
Sports!, Charles Addams Gallery, 11.29.23 - 12.7.23
let me know you are alright, CAFA, 7.28.23 -8.18.23

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unless otherwise stated, all works herein are copyright of the artist & require written permission from the artist for reproduction. © catia colagioia, 2025.

construction elevator (vigilant holding), 2024

pallet wood, pine, bark, twine, beeswax, sweat catalyzed rust, epoxy, sound fixtures, power

audio recorded on March 28, 2024 at 3201 Cuthbert Street (construction site owned by Gattuso Vigilant Holdings) with inter-spliced audio of trees being cut down & dried bark being manipulated. 1 hour 30 minutes 53 seconds, looped for the length of the gallery day.

2 ft 2 in x 3 ft 9 in x 6 ft 5 in

construction elevator (vigilant holding) (2024) is a resurrective gesture. It is a monument built with precarity, mirroring the shoddy systems that have produced each piece of the sculpture, and deemed nearly each one as waste. Within this structure, an anomaly is suspended: hollowed bark that sings–bark that is reanimated, and privileged with the ability to conduct sound. The screeching of a construction elevator is followed by silence, then birds, and then the visceral screech of a saw, and the cracking of tree bark–a droning soundscape that induces remembrance of the moment of loss–the moment where each thing ceases to exist as it was. On an actual level, the work tends to the context within which it exists. The bark conducts sound, and the elevator is a monument to mark the common experience of space & waste, of destruction & construction. On some transcendent level, this work travels through time and liveness; it prods the fantastical. It's a somehow-magical device that muses on the nature of change, of memory, of capture, recall, and relay. Upon noticing the wooden feathers that float within the tensely pulled chains and the delicately crocheted pieces of twine that cascade through the steel cutouts, framed by turned pine spindles, the monument becomes a memorial to all that will be "what once was," touched by a caring hand.