IN MY MIND'S EYE: PART ONE | DEVORA PEREZ
March 8, 2018 – March 23, 2018
Miami Beach Urban Studios
In My Mind’s Eye is a three-part thesis exhibition focused on memory and its influence on social and personal identities. As the first solo exhibition of the series, FIU MFA ’20 candidate, Devora Perez explores memory through space. Using architectural elements, Perez is influenced by domestic settings and their impact on gender, race, and class relations in society. In her works she challenges domesticity through otherness, with sites of memory being crucial to the development of belonging and transcendent thought. By using simple elements found in daily life such as fabric, wood, plastic and cement, Perez transforms the objects into a geometric template outside of the norm.
Through her use of formal and minimalistic design, Perez emphasizes color, grids, and patterns to lean into a split dimension of cast shadows of the past and a blueprint for the future. Varying between monotone and colorful pieces, the artist plays with ideas of balance and order, absence and saturation, darkness and light. While some pieces may seem fragile, light, and airy due to their materials, others are heavy and dense, both visually and physically. These juxtapositions are meant to visually divide and separate spaces, similar to the mental compartmentalization of both short and long term memory. By using real, industrial materials, Devora Perez takes the original environment of methodical memory, and breaks it to form a place to escape.
