Renée Pepion
Invitation
July 12th - August 3rd, 2025
Opening Reception: Saturday, July 12th, 7-10pm
Monte Vista Projects is proud to present Invitation, by Renée Pepion—a powerful debut solo exhibition of bronze and porcelain sculpture that confronts the awe, terror, and inevitabilities of embodied existence. Opening July 12, Invitation is both a reckoning and a celebration—a feast laid bare in the face of finality.
Rooted in themes of femininity, queerness, disability, and animality, Pepion’s hybrid figures blur the line between human and beast, victim and offering. Their bodies are contorted, exposed, and suspended in moments of helpless reflection.
“This work is my way of processing what it means to be alive in a body,” Pepion writes. “We all have a smell and a taste and a name. A swell of joy is capable of revving the muscles into dance… Feast with me.”
Invitation draws inspiration from the ritual of the Last Supper but strips it of religious promise and masculinity. Instead, viewers are invited to gather in full awareness of mortality—no resurrection, no afterlife, just the immediacy of flesh, hunger, fear, and connection. The table is not set for eternal life, but for deep presence and existential inquiry: a communion with the here and now.
The work draws from art historical traditions of beauty—its forms are lush, devotional, and deliberate. It is darkly comic, yet unwaveringly sincere. Pepion’s sculptures ask: What do we do with the fragile, fleeting chance of being alive?
Renée Pepion is an artist based on California’s Central Coast. Her work explores the intersections of femininity, disability, animality, and mortality through sculpture and installation. Invitation is her first solo exhibition.