Focus on Collage: George P. Perez

Focus on Collage: George P. Perez by Kellye EisworthNovember 18, 2020

Snapshots are a unique kind of photograph. They are not made to function as advertisements, aesthetic objects, or empirical records, but as records of memory. To their owners, they are emotionally potent representations of the people, places, and events they care about most- personal talismans against the threat of forgetting.

Artist George P. Perez uses these mementos as raw material to explore the nature of the snapshot as physical object and cultural document. Drawing from a familiar repertoire of yearbook pictures and scenic views, Perez deconstructs the photographs into units of visual information to be rearranged, repositioned, and reassembled. Perez’s collages takes on a quality of abstraction, rendering many of the details about the person or place in the photograph illegible in the process. As cultural documents, the underlying similarities in our collective approach to what – and how – we choose to photograph remain clear. As records of individual memory, they are perhaps even more accurate reflections of that faculty of the mind, reminding us that neither photographs or memories are as infallible as we imagine them to be.

Perez6_Father_Mountain_ Son_Grandma_In_Car

My work touches on a multitude of topics through a range of processes by utilizing a variety of methods that align with digital appropriation, scanography, digital photography, analog film, and in-house printing to create collages, installations, and sculptures. Playing with collected/archived images, discarded photographs, surveying/documenting multitude objects, and playing on my interests on the mundane, my primary source material is the discarded photograph. I try to present pieces that may be crude mishaps of daily life or present anamorphic characteristics in objects to create a story or narrative in lost lines of historical documentation and genealogy. In the vast amount of images or objects that I interact with on a day-to-day basis are at times seen as unimportant but hold critical stereotypical and sentimental characteristics. The works explore the hackneyed conventions and personal nuances found in inexpensive and increasingly anachronistic artifacts. I undermine but emphasize the photographs’ nostalgic qualities by tearing, scanning, and reconstructing them to be able to explore critical stances on issues that combine my interests of overlooked situations with social, environmental, and monetary topics. – George P. Perez

George P. Perez (b. OCT 7 1987) received a BFA (Cum Laude) in 2014 from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Perez is an artist whose work explores mundane situations and scenarios that he interacts with on a day-to-day basis. He is a Redline artist alum (2014-2016), was an Artist-in Residence at The Denver Children’s Museum in 2018, and a recent recipient of the Octopus Initiative MCA Denver Grant. He currently is a Photo-Facilitator with Working Assumptions based out of Berkeley, CA and an artist in M12, an award winning artist collective that specializes in rural aesthetics and landscape.

Perez has shown up and down the Front Range and outside of the state that include: (Un)Clothed, Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, CO, 2013; Archetype Drift: New Methods of Photography Making, Johalla Projects, Chicago, IL, 2013; 2014; BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS,GOCA121, Colorado Springs, CO, 2015; Monumental: RedLine’s Annual Resident Artist Exhibition, Redline Gallery, Denver, CO, 2016; Visitation, grayDuck Gallery, Austin, TX, 2016; and Liminal Space/Espacio Liminal, Museo De Las Americas, Denver, CO, 2019.

Instagram: @georgepperez

Tags: George P. Perez, Memory