Charlie Perez-Tlatenchi

Horizon(tal) Studies

 

    

    

Horizon(tal) Study 01-05, 2018
5 collages on gridded paper
3 x 5 inches (each)

“The work itself riffs off of a recent series of collages that play around with the grid as a modernist rational motif. Our control over our surrounding environment and each other often takes the form of a grid, especially in European contexts. The title describes the horizon as the separation between ground and sky as much as it is a purely formal element in the work. The horizon serves as the separation between the aspects of our surroundings we can control and those which are beyond our control. I’ve used sky as a visual cue for aspiration in past collages, and wanted to further that idea of how we visually manifest our aspirations within the physical and subsequently psychological limitations placed upon us generations ago. It is meant to be hopeful and playful rather than cynical.”

 

Charlie Perez-Tlatenchi was born and raised first-generation in Sunset Park, Brooklyn in 1994. He works with displacement as a starting point for reconciling with cultural and socio-political amnesia through methods of photography, collage and other methods of photographic abstraction. His current practice centers on the use of collage as an aesthetic intervention on diasporic identity creation and the materialization of aspiration prevalent in contemporary immigrant communities. Charlie received his BA in Studio Art from Reed College in 2017. He has recently shown work in exhibitions at Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland and CANADA Gallery, New York. Charlie is also the founder of Pastel Voids, a record label dedicated to the dispersion of music self-conscious of cultural production in a seemingly post-regional world. He ultimately runs with a work ethic inherited to him by his immigrant upbringing through various mediums that allow for communication in different aesthetic, political and cultural languages.