The Chazan Gallery at Wheeler is currently closed for Spring break. We will reopen on April 3 with the exhibition Wayfinding, featuring the work of Lisa Perez. (See below for further details.)

 

The Chazan Gallery at Wheeler is pleased to present the solo show Wayfinding, featuring the work of Lisa Perez, from April 3 - April 24, 2025. 
 

ARTIST STATEMENT

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This new work ebbs and flows between abstraction and landscape, bridging my practice and my experience of the wider, wilder, more-than-human world. Each object or image is like a sketch that strives for an essence of those experiences. Through attentive observation, I channel awe and wonder. 

Drawing on sights, sounds, and textures ー from the immense perspective on a mountain top to the moss and lichen understory ー I build a visual language, a topography of color, line, shape, and form. The amplification of a shadow behind a work parallels light and color flowing from dawn to dusk. Tactile, hand-shaped paper evokes the aliveness of an emergent terrain. A horizontal line hints at a landscape but then shifts like a tectonic plate.  

The work embodies a continual yearning for the “wild” places, an attempt to find my way back, and a realization of our complicity in their fragmentation and disappearance.  

 

Lisa Perez received her MFA from the University of California, Berkeley. She has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and Headlands Center for the Arts. Her work is in the permanent collections of the RISD Museum, Newport Art Museum, and the Fidelity Investment Corporation Collection, as well as private collections. Her work has been exhibited locally at the RISD Museum, David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University, Newport Art Museum, Bristol Art Museum and Roger Williams University. She has also exhibited work nationally at venues such as the Drawing Center in NYC, Emerson Dorsch Gallery and SCOPE, Miami. Florida as well as the Headlands Center for the Arts, CA.