catia colagioia

catia colagioia (b. 2001, Philadelphia) is a Philadelphia-based artist, researcher, and musician working across sculpture, installation, video, print, and performance. She has shown work across the Philadelphia area, and is an artist member of Vox Populi Gallery and Da Vinci Art Alliance, and holds a BA in Fine Art from the University of Pennsylvania.

Her practice is rooted in her ongoing traversal of Philadelphia. It engages the collection and resurrection of found materials and experiences, treating urban debris and overlooked objects as carriers of memory, pressure, and latent agency, often likening organic forms in the cityscape to our bodies: both held tenuously, and subject to the encircling pressures of modern systems.

Through processes of care, repair, and automatism, she reconfigures discarded materials into forms that feel simultaneously unfamiliar and deeply internal, drawing on a collective psychic language. These works often hold tension between the angelic and the abject, exposing the contradictions, failures, and residues of the systems that produce them. 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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Current exhibitions:

MOUTHFUL, Vox Populi Gallery, 5.1.26 - 6.14.26
opening reception: 5.1.26, 6-10 pm.

Upcoming exhibitions:

Precious Protection, Da Vinci Art Alliance, 7.28.26 - 8.23.26
opening reception: 8.1.26, 5-7 pm.
closing reception: 8.23.26, 12-2 pm.

Recent exhibitions:

SOUL STAKE, Gray’s Warehouse, 3.20.26 - 4.26.26
we call the moon the people’s wife, Pentimenti Gallery, 1.30.26 - 4.4.26
Huddle, Vox Populi Gallery, 11.7.25 - 12.14.25
RESIST, Huddle Gallery. 11.21.25 - 11.23.25
Routine & Alchemy, Icebox Project Space, 11.18.25 - 11.23.25
this too is a threshold, AUTOMAT, 11.1.25 - 11.29.25
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, Project Ieerie, 7.28.23 -8.18.23

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Press:

Space on Space Magazine, coverage for “SOUL STAKE” Mar 2026
Space on Space Magazine, coverage for “we call the moon the peoples wife” Mar 2026
34th St Mag, coverage for “we call the moon the peoples wife” Feb 2026
Penn Today, coverage for “let me know you are alright” Sep 2023

Talks/Panels:

Alumni Panel, Weitzman School of Design, Feb ‘26.
surplus Artist Talk. Oct ‘25. Link here.

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Click here to view CV.

For all inquiries: studio (at) catiacolagioia (dot) com

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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, 2026.

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.