Our next Volunteer outing August 22nd 11:00am
Hello Volunteers!
Hope you’re all well and enjoying the summer, albeit hot months! I’m delighted to announce our next Volunteer gathering will be a visit to the multi-disciplinary artist Michelle Peraza private studio, to meet her in person and take in her art. Most grateful for her generous offer in time and openness in sharing her art and philosophies with us in mutual dialogue. This will be similar to the outing I took you all on to Charles Pachter’s studio. An opportunity to mingle over various volunteer placements, meet other volunteers, inspired by art and the opportunity to meet the artist! You may know Michelle from when she was here at the AGO as Artist Michelle Peraza is a second-generation Latin American Canadian visual artist who centralizes LatinX identity and was AGO Artist in Residence last year. Personally, I absolutely love her art and highly respect her as an individual and artist.
A note from the artist: I was the artist-in-residence at the AGO from Aug to Oct 2024. I think this from AGO’s website will give an introduction of my work (and my website) BUT in my studio will be other works from the past year I would love to share!
This tour is limited in space and will be broken into two small groups, one at 11am and 12pm. This is first come, please RSVP and let me know if you can attend here via this link: https://forms.gle/w7bt9nbjHKGpmNbe9
Look forward to seeing you there!
Barbara Glaser. AGO Volunteer President.
Michelle Peraza artist website:
About:
In 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.