Arts and Letters

Artist Elle Pérez (b. 1989) first began making photographs as a teenager when they created thousands of pictures at all-ages punk shows in the Bronx. The pictures then, as now, were made to be shared with their community—a way to mark what had happened, and as Pérez puts it, “to speak to the future, to say we were alive.” In Pérez’s work over the last twenty years, they have continued to capture the world in a cycle of loss and reinvention through their photographs, films, collages, and writing.

Pérez works in collaboration with the people they photograph, whether strangers or members of their chosen family. It takes time, sometimes years, before making a picture seems right to them. When that moment arrives, when trust can be the foundation of the artwork, the process of making the image can begin. As Pérez puts it, “trust, like form, is not something that can be rigidly defined; form is relational and always re-inventing itself.”

This exhibition contains an expanding archive made by Pérez for the people and communities they depict. In addition to revised prints of early works, it includes a new series of photographs made in their grandfather’s garden in Puerto Rico and a film made at Papi Juice, an all-night dance party in Brooklyn. In a prose poem that unfolds across the galleries, Pérez honors the relationships and places that continue to shape their artistic vision.

The World Is Already Again Beginning, History with the Present is organized by Jenny Jaskey, Chief Curator, in collaboration with Elle Pérez. Support for the exhibition is provided by the Wolf Kahn Foundation, Miyoung Lee, and 47 Canal, New York.