Carla Perez

Artist Statement

My practice is a multidisciplinary exploration revolving around the relationships between alienation, creation, and autonomy. Through watercolors, drawings and sculpture half-sentient beings emerge and the curiosities manifest themselves as surreal animal-human hybrid bodies, usually caught walking through abstract natural spaces, abandoned woods or identified by the objects they have left behind.

The objective of this body of work is to articulate my interests in phenomenal consciousness; to go beyond what the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars called the manifest image. This world is the one we perceive through simplified pictures of colors and shapes in space.Within this exploration I have found that our minds become more apparent as we let our image multiply and reconfigures itself into different entities. For that, I am more interested in the subjective experience of consciousness; more specifically, what it feels like from the inside to be a human being. These interests are filtered through early 20th century science fiction and 19th century philosophies and heavily influenced by Dominican folklore and traditions, to portray a unique lived experience–a tourbulate, raw and incongruous vision of existence. One that questions relative reality and creates the possibility for new and unconventional ideas.