Perry Neveah Picasshoe is a transgender Mexican American artist with an art degree from UCLA who's working at the intersections of participatory practice, Queer world-making, and Chicanx spatial politics. Their art is camp, whimsical and poignantly grounded in the charm of mundane. They have a fundamental philosophy that art should be more than just something you look at - it should be something you live in. They create immersive environments, durational performances, ephemeral installations, paintings, and garment constructions, that transform private sanctuary into collective ritual. Their work metabolizes the contradictions of embodied experience, navigating Chicanx cultural frameworks, living with a bipolar disorder, and claiming space as a Queer person.
My practice delves into the enduring impact of fleeting temporal experiences. When ICE raids transform marginalized communities’ gathering spaces into ghost towns, they enact spatial violence—what geographers call “deterritorialization”, the severance of social or cultural practices from their native place. With the help of my father, we placed thirty-six 25lb ice blocks throughout the Inland Empire; the melting of the ice served as ephemeral monuments to state-sanctioned kidnappings. In Susan Sontag’s On Photography, she explores the ways in which images can be used for exploitation. Who are certain images for? To what extent can the subject consent to the images? How can these images be used as propaganda? The blocks of ice evoke the sensation of bodies huddled beneath the unforgiving California sun without exploitation of community members. The ice melts, yet the space remains haunted, highlighting the question: how do communities metabolize this loss?
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