As part of the Department of Art's 2019 Visiting Artist Series, Artist Elle Pérez will be visiting campus to give a public lecture on Thursday, October 31st at 4:30pm in the Wexner Center for the Arts Film/Video Theater.
Following the event, they will also be leading a graduate seminar with WGSS on Friday, November 1st at 10:30am in 386 University Hall. To learn more about the lecture, please visit the website event page for the seminar.
About Elle Pérez:
Elle Pérez is an artist from the Bronx. Receiving their MFA from the Yale School of Art, Pérez primarily works in photography, using portraits to portray a mix of documentary, still life, and landscape photography. They have done solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1 and 47 Canal in New York, and have had artwork featured in venues including the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the Bronx Documentary Center.
Elle Pérez’s photographs show the experience of pushing the body. Pérez’s subjects transform themselves, altering their bodies to create pleasure, pain, communion, and self-recognition. A person stares into the camera with desire, wielding a muscled arm. Bruises blossom around the eyes of a woman recovering from facial feminization surgery. “DYKE” seeps from carved skin, spelled out in blood. A luminous hand holds a bottle of testosterone. By simultaneously invoking play, nostalgia, eros, pain, and beauty, the images testify to the richness of transforming what is assumed to be definitive or immutable. These photographs are “neither reflections of reality nor imprints of personhood,” says the artist—instead, Pérez’s work is a study of the human process of creating a new reality for oneself, and an assertion that the photographic process works similarly: not replicating the world, but instead transfiguring it.
These events are co-sponsored by the Department of Art, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies.