Artist James Perkins

Описание: Artist James Perkins creates “post-totem” artworks that are both sculpture and painting, deftly referencing the history of land art and American minimalism. It takes up to two years to complete a single work, which are subject both to Perkins’ careful manipulations and the forces of nature.

Rather than presenting raw earth as the art object, Perkins transforms nature into an art object in situ at his home and studio on Fire Island in New York. He refers to his works as “post-totem” structures, paintings and sculptures that conjure the ancestral spirit of his great grandmother’s Chickasaw tradition, and go further to reference totemic symbols of power—the coded behaviors we adopt to navigate systems of identity, society, and capital in the United States. Through his practice, he situates himself in a unique methodology for art making that merges the philosophies of Land Artists like Michael Heizer, Robert Irwin, and James Turrell, with the sensibilities of minimalist painters like Ad Reinhardt, Agnes Martin, and Mark Rothko. Though these artists allowed Perkins to comprehend the limitlessness of material and form, his work depicts a contemporary politic beyond these movements, which centered white men at the epoch of American industrialization. Instead he activates this history to contemplate how abstraction can invoke a society that is postmodern, postrace, and postgender, using land to invite a harmonic, inclusive vision of the future.