Events

[ART OPENING] Given her rise from Alfred University to Columbia University, and then to last week’s announcement that she had won the biennial Seattle Art Museum’s Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Prize, it appears Squeaky Wheel may have captured a star in the making in Sondra Perry, who arrives in Buffalo this week to attend the opening of a solo exhibition called flesh out on Friday, January 20. Perry’s work in gallery shows has received increased attention in recent years, and she’s specialized in shorter videos that are at turns whimsical, amusing, provoking, and transgressive. Take 2014’s piece Authentic Columbia University T-Shirt, in which Perry hawks white T-shirts with “Columbia” crudely written across them (“union-made”) for $22.21, “one penny above costs and labor” and “cheaper than the book store,” or  2016’s netherrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr 1.0.2, which baldly critiques how the tools of society are so often designed for a white male to identify with, from software development to police training. And that’s exactly what drew Squeaky’s curator Ekrem Serdar to Perry’s work in the first place. When Serdar contacted Perry last summer, it became clear to him that Perry was approaching technology and the power structures that imbued them in a comprehensive way.

“We often ignore the ideological powers that are often inherent in technology,” Serdar wrote to The Public. “We forget, for example, that the actual film stock in photography and cinema was initially calibrated on white bodies, and that many photographs through the 20th century had a difficult time imaging anyone with darker skin; we forget that the lens as an object, on every camera from motion picture cameras to the cameras on our phones, essentially creates renaissance perspective, and accordingly leaves out other forms of visualization, knowledge.”

Perry’s work never takes the medium for granted, and instead insists on the ignored narratives to accentuate something original. She will be joined at Friday’s opening by Squeaky’s new executive director, Maiko Tanaka, in  a public conversation at 7:30pm. The opening will run 6-9pm, and the show will be on view through April 1.