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Joseph Peragine: Pass The Ammunition

Animated pink bunny figure in blue suit standing behind a podium giving a thumbs up in front of the helm of a ship with a banner upon it that reads "mission accomplished"

May 2 through July 12, 2026

OPENING RECEPTION

Saturday, May 2 from 7-10PM

Joseph Peragine’s video Pass The Ammunition uses the visual language of animation to examine how violence is normalized, circulated, and sustained—often through systems that feel impersonal, routine, and “built in.” In the context of today’s escalating tensions, the work feels especially urgent—not as commentary on a single event, but as a lens on the broader machinery of conflict: how militarized responses become default options, how rhetoric hardens into policy, and how distance (geographic, political, emotional) can make the consequences of violence feel abstract. Pass The Ammunition asks audiences to look closely at what is being “passed” along—objects, responsibility, fear, power—and to consider where agency lives within these cycles. By using animation’s capacity for transformation and exaggeration, Peragine makes the familiar strange again, creating space to reflect on complicity, escalation, and the systems that keep conflict in motion. The animation’s rhythm—precise, relentless, and hypnotic—invites viewers to notice how easily repetition can become acceptance, and how quickly a tool becomes a symbol, then a habit, then a culture.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Joseph Peragine is an artist whose work in painting, sculpture, installation, and animation has been exhibited widely in galleries, museums, and contemporary art spaces in the United States and abroad. Recent solo exhibitions include Hell on Wheels Redux at the Willson Center for Arts and Humanities at the University of Georgia, Low Anchored Cloud at the UGA Performing Arts Center, and Low Anchored Cloud at Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta. His work has also appeared in group exhibitions and screenings including …an Atlanta Biennial… at Temporary Art Center in Atlanta, exhibitions in China and Japan, and film programs such as the Garden State Film Festival, Best Shorts Competition, and The World’s Independent Film Festival.

Peragine’s practice moves fluidly across media, often combining dark humor, psychological tension, and a vivid engagement with the natural and constructed worlds. His public and site-responsive projects include Funtown at PeepSpace/Whitespace Gallery in Atlanta and Low Anchored Cloud at the Georgia World Congress Center Hotel. Earlier in his career, the City of Atlanta commissioned his permanent public installation Brute Neighbors for Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, a project that received the Atlanta Urban Design Commission Award for Excellence in Public Art.

Born in Jersey City, New Jersey, Peragine earned a B.F.A. from the University of Georgia and an M.F.A. from Georgia State University. He is currently Director of the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia.