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... Michelle Peraza is currently in-process... see previous statement below)

Michelle Peraza is a Canadian visual artist who centralizes LatinX identity within the discourse of coloniality. Through 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. 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 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, health and the asymmetry of the current geological age. She is currently aligning her creative practice and devotional aesthetics to the patterns and cyclical nature of celestial bodies.