michelle peraza

Bio
 
Michelle Peraza (b. 1991, Windsor) is a visual artist of Cuban and Costa Rican descent. She holds a BA from Western University, a BFA from OCAD University and an MFA from York University. She has completed residencies at Mauser EcoHouse (Costa Rica), Vermont Studio Centre (United States), Arquetopia (Mexico), Art Gallery of Ontario (Canada), Sustainable Colour Lab Summer Institute at OCAD University (Canada), and Gibraltor Point Centre for the Arts (Mnisiing/Toronto Islands Canada). She has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards including support from Craft Ontario, Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council, Canada Arts Council, Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Joe Plaskett Foundation. She has exhibited in public and artist-run galleries including Maison de la Culture Claude-Léveillée, Niagara Artists Centre, Cambridge Art Galleries, Sur Gallery, TAP Centre for Creativity, Guelph Civic Museum and upcoming at Tom Thomson Gallery and Neutral Ground. She teaches in the Faculty of Art at OCAD University and works and lives in Toronto/Tkaronto.

Artist Statement

(Come back after Mars completes its two year rotation... see previous statement below)

Michelle Peraza is a Canadian visual artist who centralizes LatinX identity within the discourse of coloniality. Through a research and process 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. Michelle creates large-scale figure paintings in oil of individuals close to her, people often dismissed from the art historical canon. In tandem with painting, she explores a material-based practice working with gilding precious metals, amate/amatl (Mesoamerican tree bark paper), natural dyeing textiles, hand-stitching precious gems, and pigment making as other methods for deconstructing the colonial narrative of power. Her paintings, drawings, textiles and site-specific installations serve as ways to explore (re)world-building aesthetic strategies and speaks to the exhaustion of natural resources in the Global South. Recent research and creation draws inspiration from scholars, artists, and scientists speaking from the margins, engaging with the Alt-anthro-scene (as opposed to the Anthropocene; coined by geologist Kathryn Yusoff), the Chthulucene (coined by ecofeminist Donna Haraway) and Mesoamerican cosmovision to explore the intersections of spirituality, feminism, race, climate, health, healing and the asymmetry of the current geological age. She is currently aligning her creative process and devotional aesthetics to the patterns and cyclical nature of celestial bodies, cardinal directions and Curanderismo.