Alina Perez: Family Romance

Yossi Milo is pleased to announce an upcoming exhibition with artist Alina Perez, which will open in January of 2025. In advance of the artist’s first show with the gallery, Yossi Milo will present new drawings by the artist at the 2024 edition of Untitled Art Miami Beach this December. The exhibition coincides with the inclusion of Perez’s work in Flow States – LA TRIENAL 2024, El Museo del Barrio’s second triennial survey of contemporary Latinx art.

 

Alina Perez’s (b. 1995; Miami, Florida) premiere exhibition with the gallery continues the artist’s explorations of familial narrative and the possibilities imagination brings for healing and action. In large-scale drawings depicting scenes and motifs from her own life, the artist directly addresses the dynamics of trauma and recollection. The works included in the exhibition range from intimate to grand in scale, shifting between expressive swathes of color, layered plays of material, and exactingly rendered form.

 

In her monumental works on paper, Perez blends personal recollection and imagination, combining both remembered and fantastical elements that create a realm entirely her own. Perez employs the mind’s eye, using drawing as a tool to visualize scenes that are motivated by real emotional sensations. The artist understands memory as inherently malleable and open to chance, and uses her practice as a force in the constant revision of her own past. Working in fluid narrative, Perez rethinks familial history, personal trauma, and notions of identity that are rooted in both the individual and in geography.

 

The artist consistently returns to a lexicon of symbols and environments that pull heavily from her lived experiences as a Cuban-American raised in Miami, Florida. These elements eschew straightforward notions of storytelling and narrative, instead favoring uncertain and evocative interplays of subject and setting. The artist likens the delicate balance of Florida’s ecology to that of young peoples’ inner worlds, and mines a kinship between the dense life of the region’s tropical wetlands and the depth of human experience. In Perez’s work, animals and plants act as manifestations of an environment that teems with life of its own, casting the natural realm as a shapeshifting player alongside its human inhabitants. The artist locates herself as the conduit for this lush world, a role in which she channels emotional states with energy on the elemental level of earthly phenomena.