tamen perez

Tamen Perez thinks critically about the highly mediated ways in which we experience the world. In this conversation, we talk about uncovering histories, landscape painting, optical perspective, and photography versus painting. Born in Costa Rica, she now resides in Brooklyn.

I hope you enjoy our conversation. It has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Artwork photos courtesy of the artist; artist portrait courtesy of Hannah Cash

Towards the end of our studio visit, you mentioned something that really framed your practice for me. You said, “reading about media theory helps me to situate myself and think with other people about what’s going on. There are all of these ideas of power and control and ideology that are embedded in a very unconscious way in how we as a culture see and think.” What I’m getting from that is, very broadly, you are interested in unpacking the ways we’ve been conditioned to see.

That’s a really succinct way to put it, and I love hearing it. I grew up in a demilitarized country so I feel like I’ve had to educate myself a lot in terms of understanding war economies and the current state of affairs. Mediation is what I understood as a big deal in terms of power relations, power structures, and our making the world visible or legible. Image legibility, context, those things became very obvious and important to me as the context in which I was working shifted.

How did it shift?

My undergrad was very modernist, post-modernist, heavy on painting—a very formal program. That’s not to critique it but this is the lineage within which the majority of my peers and teachers were working in and thinking around. You leave school and realize there are other things that are maybe more relevant to you. I wanted to find myself in it and find a situated place from which to speak that felt like solid ground. I didn’t feel like I could speak from solid ground if I was just quoting historical sources that don’t care about me, as a Costa Rican woman.

At that time, you had just moved to Germany, Berlin specifically, right?

Yes, and I was in Germany trying to Google “female artists in Latin America” and finding photos of girls in bikinis or Frida Kahlo or paintings of women. That was an illuminating moment: this is how an average German person is going to learn about art in Costa Rica. So I was thinking a lot about what stories tell other stories and what worlds make other worlds.

Would it be fair to say that your practice is driven predominantly by theory? It sounds like your starting place is what you’re reading. It’s less that you’re exploring with the different mediums or even subjects than—

I’m developing with the authors. I feel like I’m thinking with and I’m understanding with. I read a lot and a lot of my creative output is based on what I’m reading but not in a direct way. I’m letting things sit in my head and then all of a sudden these connections will emerge that are affirming.

Can we talk more about turning these ideas into work?

It was important to me to find methodologies of escape from white supremacist heteropatriarchal discourse. I get this often through literature, music, and cinema. For example, Afrofuturism is important to me in the sense that it is a historical tradition that wants to deal with humanism and history in a less linear, more complicated way. That is a super interesting strategy for navigating a complicated colonial history that isn’t always entirely available. When you start doing research, you find inevitable gaps from people who wrote history and wrote it in such a way that there’s mysteries and stuff that I’ll never ever know. That to me is exciting. It becomes a space for speculation that feels liberating. I’m not offering answers. I think it’s more, for me, about generating even more questions.

One strand of history that you’ve been focused on is the history of landscape painting.

That’s something I’ve been mulling over for a while. Living in Germany, romanticism is so huge. I was thinking about landscape and landscape painting in Germany. There’s also a really rich tradition of landscape painting in Latin America. I learned that one of the artists, who’s central to the canon of Costa Rican landscape painting, was a traveling German. He traveled through Guatemala and was painting jaguars and orchids. He got into some trouble, went to Costa Rica, and became a celebrated artist and professor at the University of Fine Arts. Approaching that history with a post-colonial lens, following Homi Bhabha’s ideas of colonial mimicry, taught me that I was taught how to see and how to represent my own landscape in the style of European painting. It was one of those Lacanian magical connections that you understand further in time.

Were you painting landscapes at that time?

I’ve painted landscapes. I’ve painted one successful landscape that I like. It’s this volcano. I’ve tried to paint other landscapes but my feeling is that if I make a pretty landscape and sell it then I’m only participating in the exploitation of landscape rather than actually having an opinion on it.

When I first saw this image, I didn’t immediately categorize it as a landscape painting, which only reveals my own assumptions of what a landscape is.

To me this is not a rare image. This is something I’ve seen with my own eyes more than once. It also plays with the exotification of Costa Rica as a tourist destination. It has to do with geography.

Let’s talk about perspective, and the limits of perspective, which is a significant consideration of your practice.

I read The Rhetoric of Perspective by Hanneke Grootenboer. She talks about how perspective became such a persuasive way of representing 3-D space in a 2-D way that it became naturalized and we end up taking it for granted.

Another one of these moments of encounter that really gets to me is when the Spanish reached Mexico City. They were struggling for power, there was a plague, and the friars freak out and feel the need to write everything about these people. They would get ten scribes to go learn and attempt these encyclopedic records of culture. They would have local painters paint in the tradition of Europeans. These moments of “let me shove my understanding of representation over your system of representation” expose how arbitrary hierarchies of representation are.

Right, but over time, the arbitrariness of that historicizing and narrative-making become just assumed as what and how it was.

Exactly, and I was thinking about how it relates to image circulation and our understanding of images. I started thinking about the history of perspective more and more. That led me to optics, which is also something that I had been interested in before. This latest body of work has been very much driven by my research in optics and the history of photography.

What do you mean by “the history of optics”?

I think of the fallacy of monovision that we inherited. We see in stereo, which is based on having two eyes, but everything camera-related, historically, is based on a single-point, fixed observer. We equated the eye with the camera and equated vision with a lens. That is quite incorrect. Or also lens technology has developed into photography and us naturalizing this idea that a spectator can only be in one place; never reaching the vanishing point. It all stems from an assumption that there is one eye.

As part of these investigations, you made your own camera right?

I was in residency at the Center for Book Arts and I made this camera out of Davey board, tape, and a three-inch magnifying lens. The lens projects the focused image to the back wall of the box where I put in the light sensitive paper and then leave it for four or five hours to expose. I then stop the chemistry with water and have a photographic negative. It’s magic.

Then I’ve been taking iPhone photos of those negatives. I print them out and scan them and flip them back and flip them again. I like to photograph the negative on a surface. That is an example of a photograph of a negative on a developing tray. This is the same photograph inverted in CMYK.

I’m really taken with the colors and the details and the confusion of the positive and negative. It feels like space is folding into itself, like color spaces, like CMYK and RGB. I haven’t really reconciled which one is the real version. So much is about the flattening of dimensions. It ends up being this very painterly photograph.

Each action that you’re taking moves it further and further away from its origin, whether that is the landscape you’ve photographed or that first negative.

The issues it brings up are definitely about multiplicity and orders of representation—or reproducibility versus the single, uniqueness, one-off-ness of the painting, the singular object.

I liked how you were saying that these are more painterly than your paintings, and then your paintings are more photographic than the photographs. What does that mean to you?

I think again it’s this conflation. This misuse of the representational technique. Photography is supposed to equate with verisimilitude. Painting is understood as biased. I’m trying to say that photography is equally biased. At least now, photographs are not always real or they do not represent reality, in the way that historically they have been an indexical marker of truth. There’s also this painterly aspect of light and accident in the process. They’re painterly also in that they don’t seem to be capturing an instance so much, or perhaps because the exposure is so long, they capture a long amount of time, so the way you navigate it feels different. It feels more like a painting where you get to scan and learn about the thing slowly versus immediately getting the full narrative, you’re kind of not sure if this exists. Or it’s toying with that.

And how does that relate to the subject matter of what you’re choosing to photograph—an industrial landscape?

I was thinking about landscape. The landscape that I see around me is this very decaying, Robert Smithson’s Monuments of Passaic type of landscape. This is a totally industrial landscape so it makes sense to put it through all of the mediation. It feels like a logical conclusion of being totally myopic.

Now that we’ve introduced your paintings in this context, as more photographic, let’s talk about them. They seem to speak from a different language than the photographs. This one is a very large cloth, pinned directly to the wall, with an assemblage of vaguely clothing-like objects, all flattened and painted with the same shade of red.

I think this is a very different language that is coming more from an affective place, the materials are directly indexical to my body. These are bed sheets that I’ve used, clothes that I’ve worn, cherry pits that I ate and spat on the painting. It does end up being very much directly related to me in a way that the photographs are not, because there’s so many layers of mediation within them. There’s also that kind of contrast in my work, the extreme direct indexical contact versus the removal of my hand, my finger, my voice. Also it is an archaeological read. It does read in a flat, diagrammatic way that is not deep, in a perspectival way.

It does feel like the viewer is looking at it from a birds-eye-view. Can you explain more about the impulse in this work towards engaging in a more bodily way, not only bed sheets but also clothing strewn throughout?

The way I arrived at attempting to make paintings out of my bedsheets was part of the same reason why I’m not stretching paintings. I really feel that the commercial availability of canvas and stretcher bars sets a standardized default: the painting starts after the stretchers and the canvas is stretched and the surface is prepared. There are a ton of decisions that have been made for you, that relate to essentialist modernist philosophy, that are about the gestalt modernist object existing in its own isolated world. Part of the reason was also that I have so much cotton—why am I going to buy canvas at the store?

In this case then, you’re trying to strip away the levels of mediation between you and the art object.

Yes, there’s history that gets erased in the canvas just showing up out of nowhere. It’s so alienated to me. I wanted to transmit this anxiety or confusion of materiality versus immateriality. Or the heaviness of the excessive informational availability of images now. For example, compressing image storage. Things become smaller but they’re somehow more material, but somehow also smaller. That’s a stressful contradiction to me. The question of why are you going to the store to buy canvas. The want for materiality feels very excessive to me and also contradictory to digitality and tactility.

Right, we think about excess and materiality as very physical things, unrelated to the digital sphere, but in fact, the digital is just as excessive in disguise.

I feel like this is where the sensation is coming from for me: landfills and volume and alienation and sealed off surfaces.

What about the specificity of the different objects themselves, like tube socks, a plastic apron, and an electrical cord?

I wanted to include things that have a broad range between personal wear and industrially-made and have them coexist and have relationships emerge by virtue of the coexistence of these elements together, contradictory though they are. To me that’s how it feels when I think of actually Leonardo da Vinci painting The Last Supper at the same time that Christopher Columbus was literally sailing to America. The Last Supper is this modernist temple of Cartesian depth, so elegant and minimalist.

It’s surprising to realize they are happening at nearly the same moment.

Yeah, and how do you hold these things simultaneously? How can this exist next to that? So there is a lot of anxiety and stress in these—and that’s part of what I want them to have. Again, an affective vibe. I don’t want my work to be free of conflict. I don’t want everything to be all resolved always.

I feel that I relate this to music. I think about what kind of music I’m making or the notes you’re striking. I want them to strike notes of gravity. Or have different kinds of weight if it’s not going to be physical weight, even though these do become heavy.

Part of this interview series is that I’m asking each artist to direct me to the next. So, who is an artist working today that you are intrigued by, and what is it about their practice you’re intrigued by?

Margaret Hewitt is a person I admire deeply and always learn from. We met in Berlin over a decade ago when she was doing 3-D modeling for a 3-D printing company. Originally trained as an architect, she’s now a fabricator and produces incredible artworks for artists and institutions. Her ability to envision matter in space and then make it a reality is beautiful. She’s able to stay true to her vision and intuitions and loves what she does.

Published September 8, 2024