Yossi Milo Gallery proudly presents “Family Romance,” the inaugural solo exhibition by emerging artist Alina Perez. This groundbreaking showcase delves into the realms of memory, trauma, and fantasy through Perez’s distinctive charcoal and pastel drawings.
Perez’s artistic practice operates on a psychic plane, employing an internal emotional logic to craft surreal tableaux that transcend conventional narratives. By altering closely held recollections, the artist composes scenes that are at once familiar and otherworldly. Her drawings serve as portals, offering glimpses into alternate realities where emotional sensations take tangible form, revealing the true power of imagination.
In “Family Romance,” Perez escalates her exploration of pivotal personal experiences, reimagining critical memories and reshaping their dynamics. The exhibition challenges traditional hierarchies within familial and romantic relationships, allowing them to expand, shift, and collapse at will. Perez’s work grapples with the aftershocks of trauma, questioning the effects of secrecy, complicity, and disclosure while uncovering sources of power that fuel her creative process.
The artist’s deep engagement with her youth in Miami, Florida, infuses the exhibition with charged forms and poetic interpretations of Floridian urban life and nature. Perez draws parallels between the fragility of ecosystems like the Everglades and the vulnerability of the human psyche, positioning nature as a sentient actor among its human inhabitants. Figures in her works undergo metamorphoses, sprouting claws and feathers, as bodies become as malleable as memory itself.
Perez’s technique is as evocative as her subject matter. Using dry media, she creates layers of opaque pigment that build and ebb across the paper’s surface. Her approach shifts between precise, dimensional rendering and liberated materiality, mirroring the fluctuating affects of memory and emotion. The resulting works are dense at their centers, fanning out into delicate webs of pigment that seem poised to blend seamlessly from one drawing to the next.
Born in 1995 in Miami, Florida, Alina Perez has quickly established herself as a compelling voice in contemporary drawing. Her work challenges viewers to reconsider the boundaries between reality and fantasy, memory and imagination. Through “Family Romance,” Perez invites audiences to explore the transformative power of revisiting and reimagining personal histories.
“Family Romance” opens to the public on Thursday, January 16, with an artist’s reception from 6-8 PM, and will be on view through Saturday, March 8, 2025, at Yossi Milo Gallery.
