Elbert Joseph Perez
FROM WHAT I REMEMBER
Curated by Michael Howard
Reception: May 26th, 6-8pm
Dates: May 26 - June 25, 2022
Hours: Thurs - Sat 12-6pm
Field Projects is proud to present FROM WHAT I REMEMBER, a solo exhibition of new oil paintings by Elbert Joseph Perez. This new body of work unveils Perez’s fantastical underpainting previously housed beneath the porcelain veneer of opaque overpainting by exposing the viewer to the fantastical underpainting housed beneath.
The human experience is a string of suffering, a rube goldberg machine of pain infliction, a tumbling row of dominoes that strike the mind with reminders of our general malaise, but Perez shows us that we can make peace by setting our focus on odd disruptive moments of bliss. In FROM WHAT I REMEMBER, Perez demonstrates that we can both endure and maintain our focus on pain as well, and that all depends on what truth we decide to create and indulge in. We can revel in the fact that these disruptive moments can give us pause, from either pain or joy.
Perez claims that agency is nominal at best, but believes that being equipped with a sense of lack will allow us to survive when the stream of malaise is disrupted by moments of peace, and when those times do come we can fixate our gaze on opportunities. These opportunities give us a moment to accept a reflection that co-exists with the event at hand, and our translation to it. There are many truths requiring heterogeneous contexts but at the end of the day, as we give ourselves to the world, we ultimately pick the one that we will find most fitting to keep our eyes away from our suffering, if only for a moment.
To Perez, the only truth in witnessing an event at the point of impact is the testimony of the actionable occurrence. What needs to be discovered is the cause, and then the consequence, to establish a narrative that falls within the scope of a hard truth. Relational subjectivity to the event will establish a rhizomatic bouquet of “truths” that may or may not be “materially true”. A consequence of this is the intramural development of context, which when interjected into an event, establishes a connection, and the emotionality creates a boundary which houses the accepted reality.
With an emphasis on underpainting, Perez illustrates isolated moments in a visual event by rendering subjects that are "truly" significant. Perez refocuses this importance in the way that people recall events or memories in their individual ways much akin to the Rashomon effect. While that phenomena is typically reserved for logical interpretations of an event, FROM WHAT I REMEMBER emphasizes the emotional interpretations of these events, and what a person might truly view as significant, and whether it's beneficial or detrimental to their personal interjections. Regardless of what happens before a number of witnesses, disparate elements of such an event are held on to by different viewers. By attending FROM WHAT I REMEMBER, the viewer participates in a chaotic moment of event production initiated by Elbert Perez, distended into sensorial signals and touchstones of truths.
