Two performers whip their bodies around blindingly white interiors, swallowed nearly whole by their environment. Perry achieves this effect by repurposing Photoshop tools that attempt to automatically “fill in” or erase parts of an image using artificial intelligence. The result is a pair of immersive fields in which the Black subject appears both dazzlingly spectacular and nearly invisible, dissolving or going underground. “The preoccupations of my work are around technologies of representation, technologies of lenses, surveillance,” Perry has said, “how Blackness or Black culture show up in those spaces, how they navigate, how they explode representation altogether.”
Gallery label from Signals: How Video Transformed the World, March 5–July 8, 2023