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Selected Collections: Albrecht Knox, Buffalo, New York; Kemper Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; Chicago Art Institute; Fogg Art Museum Seattle, Washington; de Young Museum of Art, San Francisco, California; The Milwaukee Art Museum; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

Awards include Art Omi International Artists’ Residency, 2008; Inspiration Grant, Satellite Exhibitions, 2007; Creative Capital Development Program, 2007; Art In the Loop, Laura DeAngelis Celestial Flyaways, 2006; Avenue of the Arts public arts project grant, 2002; and Charlotte Street Fund, 2002. Other Activities include: (1997-present) Owner and director of Fahrenheit Gallery; Contributing writer and illustrator to Review Magazine; and Cofounder of Satellite Exhibitions.

www.peregrinehonig.com

Southern California, 37 x 35".

Allowing myself to make artwork about fashion was an indulgent and necessary development. My drawings needed to be bigger because they were moving physically forward. After coyly naming the series "Fashism", I was wisely reprimanded by the critic Zane Fisher for the weak combination of "fashion" and "facism" for a title. The more appropriate and honest title of the new work came me to me a month after the show opened.

When I get to Miami or New York and pull out the card that gets me past the beautiful crowd, into the front row seat of a fashion show, my heart always skips. I still feel like it isn’t quite my place, that I don’t quite belong, that somehow, even with the store and the focus of my art, I have managed to slip in uninvited. So I rechristen my work with all the love, emotion, and labor that has gone into understanding it. I am the first to sit in front of my art, decide on this season’s trends and colors, models and themes. I am V.I.P. These girls in my new work are "V.I.P.": first off the line to be ushered into the club. They are bizarre and overtly sexual to the point of primal indecency. They follow trends to the edge of racism and criminal intent. They will wear anything to be beautiful and young, noted and admired. There is no limit to their acceptance of ornamentation as a vehicle for displaying luxury and defining fashion.

Being raised in a feminist environment can trip a budding fashionista on her heels. Coveting luxury goods from an objectifying industry did not coincide with the "Our Bodies Ourselves" mantras and aesthetics of my childhood. Sure, I believe in gender equality and I continue to fight and raise money to ensure women’s rights locally and globally. I also believe there are women who are more beautiful that other women. I am talking about the outside, the surface and facade.

I enjoy the glistening shell the fashion industry delivers to me. Perhaps the environment I was raised in allows me step back in a way less politically nourished women are able to. No amount of dieting, makeup, surgery, or jewelry will transform me into the six foot tall Japanese Brazilian girl slamming her lean frame down the bright runway. Her skin is amazing, her body defined and unconventional. While I desire to slip inside her and view the world from behind her smoky eyes, I understand that this is the wonder of fashion and the fashion industry. She is a luminous screen draped in silk and I project a reality onto her. The narration behind my projection determines my version of the show’s success. I am obligated to my aesthetic.

The Fawns

I came upon twin fawns in the display case of a mom and pop toy and science store in Kansas City, Missouri. It took me two years to win the trust of the shop owner and save the money to buy them. A taxidermist spotted a dead deer by the side of the road. He stopped to properly dispose of the body and realized she was pregnant. He opened her and found near full-term twin fawns, he removed and preserved them.

Deer rarely have twins and the taxidermist retained the uterine gesture of their bodies. I built them a vitrine with a light blue base. Their prematurity exaggerates the delicacy of an incredibly sweet thing. The points of their hooves, the length of their lashes, the spots of their hides, nose to small nose in an ur-cartoonish realism … Viewers' eyes trick them into believing the fawns are breathing. The tragedy of beauty is its transience.

The twins live forever in their own demise. They are sleeping beauties.They have been muses since I first saw them …

We dress death in lilies and bronze the names of our dead sons on walls. We erect altars of toys and hold candlelight vigils to express hope. My twin fawns sleep endlessly on their baby blue block in my studio. The twins never opened their eyes yet their wondrous fatality evokes an acceptable alternative to death.

— Peregrine Honig