Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Sondra Perry
American; 21st-century
Chicago, IL: Art Institute of Chicago
61%
couch and fern, GLITTER AND THE LION'S MANE. 2024. Sofa with video screen, fern, sound, motorized barber shop chair, urethane, acrylic, glitter, iron, lion's mane mushrooms, vinyl, PEVA
The nimbler (better) artists among the identitarians who ruled the 2010s have taken the 2020s to, well, not really attenuate the role which things like race and gender play within their work, but rather to denature and disperse identity categories and to deploy them as a sort of conceptual sinew that links up disparate objects, images, and ideas. This is a welcome development, and it's aligned with a broader trend towards meaning-agnostic, object-oriented systems art (see, say, Isabelle Frances McGuire). I haven't seen much of Perry's stuff, but I get the sense that she's a vanguardist of this sort of approach (i.e. she's had, for maybe a decade, a complicating sense for how the notion of blackness ought to figure into her art's form). couch and fern is a potted plant, a hairdresser's chair inoculated with mushrooms, and a tipped-over couch with a TV on its underside. The TV plays a video collage of roads soundtracked by a conversation between the artist and her analyst about a racially coded, displacement-related nightmare. So, the plant-chair-couch ensemble is a dreamscape that only comes into view as such (rather than as a bunch of odd quotidian materials) through the interplay between the objects themselves (which are, we assume, private symbols of the artist's memories and associations) and the video's audio (which, as a psychoanalytic thing, is like a public formalization of her unconscious fears and desires — private life made public text). The simultaneous ambivalence of the objects' physical relations and solidity of their conceptual linkage is aesthetically productive. However, there's a straightforwardness to the dream-logic that connects everything that is to the artwork's detriment. I think this straightforwardness is what Perry tried to counter by seeding the chair with mushrooms, but it comes across as a little last-ditched and desperate. (2025)