The young New York artist Sondra Perry already made an impression in Seattle this year. Her work was your ecstatic, manic escort through a darkened tunnel to enter the phantasmagoria of Disguise at Seattle Art Museum (above). Now, Perry returns to Seattle for a performance and exhibition opening tomorrow night at Institute for New Connotative Action (INCA), a small independent gallery in lower Queen Anne.
I was surprised to hear from INCA that this will be Perry’s first solo show. She’s out there already in group shows, even as a barely minted MFA “from an expensive New York art school causing gentrification in Harlem,” her CV says (the phrase linking through to Columbia).
It’s possible to get a good taste of her work online. At INCA, she’ll show a 26-minute video, a photography series, and a one-night-only performance.
Here’s a performance from this spring, Peg. It includes a Karafun version of Steely Dan and footage of Geraldo covering Baltimore’s protests for Fox News.
When I think of what I’ve seen of Perry’s work, I think of Kimya Dawson, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lindy West—I think not only of photography and video but of music, politics, history, humor.
Her video work at INCA is the 2015 Lineage for a Multiple-Monitor Workstation: Number One. In a series of episodes at her family’s home in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, Perry enlists her extended family to act out scenes for the camera. They dig up buried flags in her grandmother’s yard. She tells them to “connect” at the dining-room table but not in a “corny” way, so they peel sweet potatoes wordlessly. They wear neon-green ski masks that are a repeating prop in her work; the green is the same color as a green screen, the surface that filmmakers use to create blank space they can project onto.
The other work at INCA is Red Summer, titled after the race riots of 1919, which took place in cities all over the U.S. To make the photographs, Perry set off fog bombs in the backyard at her grandparents’ house. The old couple sit in their plastic lawnchairs, variously visible, maybe only one of their feet visible in the fog cloud in the middle of the plants and tchotchkes.
I’l leave you with a quick hit: In My Twilight Zone Thing (below), Perry pairs footage from episodes of the old TV show with her own reenactments in her studio. Guess which moment made me giggle. (Hint: it’s foggy, too.)
