Multidisciplinary artist and printmaker Serena Perrone presents a double-sided peep show theater and tunnel book currently on view at the Atlanta Contemporary, weaving Tiepolo, Sicilian puppet theater and the pre-cinematic spectacle of watching while being watched into a work that mythologises and implicates in equal measure.
Tiepolo’s painting Mondo Nuovo in the Ca’Rezzonico in Venice shows a crowd gathered around a diorama, each person waiting their turn to peer inside, while the painter watches them from outside the frame and places us, the viewers, in exactly the same position. We are spectator, participant, subject and character at once. Serena Perrone has been thinking about that painting for a long time, and Fata Morgana/Mondo Nuovo is the fullest expression of that thinking yet.
The work is a double-sided peep show theater and tunnel book, currently on view at the Atlanta Contemporary as part of the National Museum of Women in the Arts Georgia Chapter’s exhibition 2026 Women to Watch: A Book Arts Revolution. The two sides present two contrasting narratives superimposed on the same landscape. Fata Morgana, loosely referencing Greek mythology and Arthurian lore surrounding Mount Etna, represents a place of fantasy and promised harmony, appearing and reappearing like the Aeolian Islands in changing light. Mondo Nuovo reveals the same place through a darkened lens: the hidden all-seeing eye, subplots in the periphery, a culture of excess and paranoia obscured by the beautiful chaos of natural surroundings. When two people peer in from opposing ends simultaneously, each is met by the uncanny gaze of a disembodied eye, the gaze of the other spectator, punctuating the final scene.
The work draws on the history of the tunnel book, popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, in which layered scenes with cut-out centres reveal the scenes behind through an accordion bellow expansion, viewed through a small oculus on the front page. Like the magic lantern before it, the form carries a collective longing for elsewhere and the fantasy of being an unseen observer. Tiepolo knew that fantasy was false. Perrone knows it too. The hand-sculpted and cast porcelain facades are replicas she made of the oratory in her Sicilian hometown, overlooking the main square; the interior proscenium scenes are double-sided, hand-coloured screen prints. The figures are Greek statuary placed into real environments, re-enacting true stories from a recent past.
“My works have begun to focus on stories embedded in and told through material culture,” Perrone says, “reaching across disciplines to permit a closer lineage between objects and their associated narratives. Placing emphasis on stories marked by instances of contradiction, mystery, and duality, my various constellations of works are unified by their recurring motifs, relying heavily on process, workmanship, and decoration.” The book arts context of the current exhibition makes a particular kind of sense for a work that uses the expanded book form as precisely that: a device for storytelling that spans and unites disciplines.
Serena Perrone is a multidisciplinary artist and printmaker whose practice spans print, sculpture and the decorative arts. She received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and is an Associate Professor at Georgia State University. Her work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is the founder and director of Officina Stamperia del Notaio, an international multidisciplinary artists’ residency in Sicily, and is represented by Cade Tompkins Projects.
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Fata Morgana/Mondo Nuovo. Double-sided peep show theater and tunnel book. Hand-sculpted and cast porcelain, hand-coloured screen prints. Installation views, the Atlanta Contemporary, February 2026. Images courtesy the artist.
