michelle peraza

about

Michelle Peraza is a second-generation Latin American Canadian visual artist who centralizes LatinX identity within the discourse of coloniality. 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. She 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 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. 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), the Chthulucene and Mesoamerican cosmovision to explore the intersections of feminism, race, climate and health and the asymmetry of the current geological age. This research is inspired by the colonial-led movement of plant life throughout the globe, the dissemination of drawn and painted botanical images, our lived and embodied experiences of plants, geological strata, entanglement, mending, plant properties of healing, experimentation in natural dyeing with plants, and aligning her creative practice to the sun and the moon patterns.