Michelle Peraza
Home: Toronto, Ontario
Title: green gold
Media: Acrylic, gesso, oil and charcoal on panel
Dimensions: 193 x 121 cm
Website: michelleperaza.com
Instagram: @mperaza_
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am a second-generation Latin American Canadian visual artist who centralizes LatinX identity within the discourse of coloniality. Through figuration and a research-driven practice, I explore themes of postcolonialism, transculturation, feminism, refusal, resilience, ambiguity, extraction and relocation, the dissemination of images, and representation. I create large-scale figure paintings in oil of individuals close to me, people often dismissed from the art historical canon. This is a large-scale self portrait, engaging with the representation of a pineapple. A pineapple is indigenous to the Americas, with its top producer being Costa Rica, my father’s country. They are grown in monoculture farms to feed the global appetite for the “exotic” fruit. Engaging with my education in Classics, the pineapples reference the shape of a column, an architectural method that conotes empire. Decentering myself in this composition, my paintings often explore the margins as a site of resilience and empowerment, however, the pineapples to scale of me also indicates the complexities of being situated in the Global North, with ties to the Global South, thereby thinking through my own complicity in the continued extraction of Latin America.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Michelle Peraza (b. 1991, Windsor) is a visual artist of Cuban and Costa Rican descent. She holds a BA from Western University, a BFA from OCAD University and an MFA from York University. She has completed residencies at Mauser EcoHouse (Costa Rica) and Vermont Studio Centre (United States), Arquetopia (Mexico), and most recently, at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto, Canada) as the AGO X RBC Artist-in-Residence. Peraza has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards including support from Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council, Canada Arts Council, Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Joe Plaskett Foundation. She has exhibited in public and artist-run galleries including Niagara Artists Centre, Cambridge Art Galleries, Sur Gallery, TAP Centre for Creativity, and Guelph Civic Museum. As part of Silksolk Collective, she participated in Nuit Blanche in 2024 as well as co-curated the exhibition Between Ashes and Dreams at OCAD University, a group exhibition engaging with the urgency of the global climate crisis. She teaches in the Faculty of Art at OCAD University and works and lives in Toronto/Tkaronto.