michelle peraza

about

Michelle Peraza is a second-generation Latin American Canadian visual artist who centralizes LatinX identity within the discourse of coloniality. She creates large-scale figure paintings in oil of individuals close to her, people often dismissed from the art historical canon. Through figuration and a research-driven practice, she explores themes of postcolonialism, transculturation, feminism, refusal, resilience, ambiguity, extraction and relocation, the dissemination of images, and representation. She seeks to engage with generational knowledge and memory by way of familial and women-centric ties. In tandem with painting, Peraza explores a material-based practice working with 23k gold leaf, genuine silver leaf and amate/amatl (Mesoamerican tree bark paper) as an-other method of deconstructing the colonial narrative of power. Drawing and site-specific installation serve as ways to explore world-making aesthetic strategies and speaks to the exhaustion of natural resources in the Global South.