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.

through chainlink, watch the big mouth eat the earth, 2023

35 mm film prints, photogram

8 in x 10 in

With the recent boom in development in Philadelphia, there are palpable feelings of invasion, vulnerability, and theft. It feels like a dark cloud passing over the community, as many of my neighbors and my family–just like so many folks from other low-income neighborhoods in Philadelphia and beyond–are being actively pushed out of their communities.The photographs focus on sites of development, surveillance devices, and barriers to entry (physical and legal)–from dismembered chain link fences and tall black wooden barriers to signs that note police limits or the invocation of the threat of legal consequence (trespassing violation) to a once publicly accessible park.

While printing the photographs, I utilized a photogram technique to create another layer of obstruction. The semiotics of the photogrammed objects (barbed wire and chain link) are complicated, invoking a careless claim to ownership, invoking the racist and classist history of trespassing laws, and more simply, standing as a bulletin for outdated zoning permits and graffitied construction company signs, a reminder of the cascading and lasting damage of colonial land dynamics.