RAINRAIN is pleased to present The Moon Takes Shape of an Outsider's Light, the debut solo exhibition by New York–based artist Maya Perry. Featuring a new body of work across animation, drawing, sound, and installation, the exhibition reflects Maya’s evolving exploration of memory and embodiment.
The exhibition navigates the spaces where memory fractures and re-forms: evoking the sensation of a dream remembered before it ever existed. Rather than narrating specific events, Perry works with what lingers: a fragmented retelling of experiences mutated through repetition.
The motif of the bed recurs throughout the exhibition as both sanctuary and stage. The bed becomes a site of metamorphosis, a threshold where mediums and emotional states leak into one another—an entry point into a room that exists within a body rather than a structure.
The work examines the complexities of attachment: the many ways we become bound, leashed, or tied—to our histories, to our habits, sometimes in love, sometimes in survival, and sometimes in the quiet aftermath of things we never fully named.
Among the works in the exhibition is a stop-motion animation, hand-painted frame-by-frame using watercolor on paper and oil on glass directly atop a light box. It brings to life a hybrid creature—part dog, part wolf, part human—that embodies both primitive innocence and emotional volatility. A dog runs. Two tongues touch. A wolf bares its teeth. A tail forms into a leash. These visual transformations raise questions about how ferality, rage, and vulnerability coexist.
In the corner of the room, a looper pedal connected to a guitar amp carries a soft synth composition by the artist. The loop repeats, gradually dissolving until only the sound of a deep breath is remnant in the space. Visitors are invited to take a breath with the artist—a gesture of shared presence.
Perry’s practice probes the fragile thresholds between human and nonhuman life, vulnerability, and survival within memories marked by rupture. Animals and insects embody both care and threat, tenderness and estrangement, mirroring how violence reorganizes relationships and identities. By attending to repetition, metamorphosis, and the dissolution of boundaries between human and nonhuman, her work insists on reading catastrophe not only through human suffering but also through the altered entanglements of entire ecologies.
Her hybrid creatures resist fixed categories, collapsing distinctions between human and animal while tracing how relationships are fractured and reconfigured. The child’s bed flanked by moths embodies this site of protection and vulnerability, where tenderness is always shadowed by estrangement, and where mourning becomes inseparable from the possibility of transformation.
The Moon Takes Shape of an Outsider’s Light is a space of disrupted intimacy and unsettled care. Like a heart racing within stillness, the work pulses with a quiet urgency. Here, metamorphosis is not only a shifting self, but a continual return.
The Moon Takes Shape of an Outsider’s Light is a space of disrupted intimacy and unsettled care. Like a heart racing within stillness, the work pulses with a quiet urgency. Here, metamorphosis is not only a shifting self, but a continual return.
For all inquiries, please contact hello@rainraingallery.com
Maya Perry (b. 1994, New York, NY) is a multidisciplinary artist and a graduate of the Yale University MFA program in Painting/Printmaking. She spent her formative years performing experimental music both collaboratively and as a solo artist. Her animated films have been screened at international festivals, including Tricky Women in Vienna and Lago Film Fest in Italy. Perry has participated in residencies such as Kinosaito in Verplanck, New York, and was a fellow at the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM) in New Haven, Connecticut. Her work has been exhibited at venues including Perrotin Gallery in New York and The Next Contemporary in Toronto, Canada. She currently lives and works in New York City.
