Sondra Perry rigorously considers the dehumanisation of Black bodies from a historical and personal perspective, using visual strategies culled from computer-based media to reflect critically on the intricacies of experience and identity. Perry’s installations and videos are replete with technologies of representation, including easy-to-access tools like avatars, open-source 3D modelling softwares, found footage from YouTube, and chroma-key blue screens, which together lend a DIY air to her uncanny cyborg aesthetic. Centrally, Perry creates a juxtaposition between digital culture and discussions of politics, injecting an important, but all too rarely discussed theoretical confluence: media theory and critical race studies. Over the last few years, Perry, who was born in the Jersey Shore beach town of Perth Amboy, has frequently reflected on the violent history of the Middle Passage, often inserting herself into images that tell a history of the transatlantic slave trade and the devastating brutality enacted against those people captured at sea. Lineage for a Phantom Zone (2021) centres around a hair salon that used to operate in Perry’s studio building in Newark, New Jersey, and the artist’s search for the land upon which her grandmother was born and worked as a sharecropper. Presented in an immersive installation, the dreamlike narrative reflects upon the ways the telling of history constructs lived experience and the collective imagination can hold transformative power.
Madeline Weisburg
