SONDRA PERRY

Early Years

Born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, Perry received a BFA from Alfred University (2012) and an MFA from Columbia University (2015) in New York.

Sondra Perry Artworks

Sondra Perry works with a range of digital media, among them 3D animation and open-source software, to investigate layered relationships between technology, power, and representations of the Black body. Personal history and family often provide the starting points for Perry, although the artist also works with found images and footage sourced from the Internet.

Colour

Colour is ambiguous but never neutral in Perry’s work, as shown in Lineage for a Multiple Monitor Workstation: Number One (2015), in which her family members appear wearing green ski masks. In chroma keying, green is the transparent colour over which different images or video clips are be overlaid. Perry could present her family as different people, constructing new identities, but does not; though their faces remain hidden, they are distinguishable from one another in their gestures and voice.

Blue is central to the 3D animation video netherrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr 1.0.3 (2016), whose footage includes portraits of Black women killed by police and that of Bill Gates and Microsoft executives dancing at the Windows 95 launch. A computerised voice describes two different kinds of blue: the blue error screen of the Windows operating system, also known as the ‘Blue Screen of Death’, and the ‘blue wall of silence’ or ‘blue code’, an informal code among police officers to withhold information about their colleagues’ misconduct.

netherrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr 1.0.3 was included in Resident Evil, Perry’s 2017 solo exhibition at The Kitchen, New York, where gallery walls without video installations or projections were painted in the same shade of blue as the error screen.

Black Body

Perry also evoked the physicality of violence against the Black body in Typhoon coming on, a solo exhibition at the ICA Miami and London‘s Serpentine Sackler Gallery in 2018. Using digital manipulation, the artist projected magnified details of JMW Turner’s 1840 painting The Slave Ship onto the gallery’s interior walls. Turner’s work, originally titled Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying — Typhoon coming on, has been suggested to derive from the Zong massacre of 1781, in which a British crew aboard the slave ship Zong killed more than 130 enslaved Africans.

Flesh Wall (2016–2020), which similarly employs magnified footage, focused on Perry’s own skin. Appearing on the billboards of New York’s Time Square in 2021, the extreme close-ups rendered skin almost unrecognisable, while retaining the corporeality of the flesh.

Dream Commission

The winner of the biannual Rolls-Royce Dream Commission in 2021, Perry presented Lineage for a Phantom Zone at Fondation Beyeler, Basel, in February 2022. The video work, which the artist described as ‘preoccupied with memory’ to Ocula Magazine, explores a fictional dream about her grandmother and the erasure of Black history in the American South.

Exhibitions

Sondra Perry has shown her works in solo and group exhibitions internationally.

Selected solo exhibitions include Lineage for a Phantom Zone, Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2022); Sondra Perry: A Terrible Thing, Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland and Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark (2019); Sondra Perry: Typhoon coming on, Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2018); Sondra Perry: flesh out, Squeaky Wheel, New York (2017); Resident Evil, The Kitchen, New York (2016).

Selected group exhibitions include Information (Today), Kunsthalle Basel (2021); Celebration of Our Enemies: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2019); Multiply, Identify, Her, International Center of Photography Museum, New York (2018); Family Pictures, Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio (2018); Greater New York, MoMA PS1, New York (2015); A Constellation, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2015).

Website

Perry’s website can be found here.

Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2022