Elle PEREZ
neil's funeral, 2023
Digital silver gelatin print
Unframed 40.64 × 50.80 cm
(16 × 20 in)
My friend died from kidney failure last April. His funeral was at the funeral home right under the train tracks on Westchester Avenue. It was his death that (finally) helped me understand “lower life expectancy” as not a concept but a reality, specifically my reality. Previously I understood this in the context of suicide. Lower life expectancy. Ok, just don’t kill yourself Elle. But with Neil, the environment, the Bronx, his body, killed him at 35. If I think about it too hard I start crying. I loved Neil. Neil and I had a really special relationship, the kind where a straight guy loves a lesbian in a “one that got away” way but respects that they’re a lesbian, which is a certain kind of tensioned bromance. I’m a lesbian in this scenario because it’s easier. So he was one of my early platonic boyfriends. I have had a few but the early ones are special to me. His funeral was so confusing. I’m used to being around these people, my friends, in this number (punk shows), but not for this reason, usually. We have been here before - with critic, with konrad, - but this was different, only we thought he was cheated. The flowers reminded me of a garden, the mirror reminds me of the subway and the water and whatever abyss I keep alluding to or trying to get into. The picture feels haphazard. It feels like a glass box I can't enter but know the insides of so well. There is no world outside the edges, there are no words outside the edges. Neil was Hindu, which means that for him death signals the attainment of liberation or the continuation of his soul’s journey. I’m impressed with the formal decisions my mind makes under fragmented circumstances of grief.
Elle PEREZ - writing 2023
Elle PEREZ
neil's funeral, 2023
Digital silver gelatin print
Unframed 40.64 × 50.80 cm
(16 × 20 in)
Framed 41.59 × 51.75 × 3.81 cm
(16 ⅜ × 20 ⅜ × 1 ½ in)
Edition of 5 plus 2 AP
Photo: Joerg Lohse
Elle PEREZ is an artist from the Bronx, New York, who lives and works in New York City. PEREZ primarily works in photography and moving image, depicting intimate moments, emotional exchanges, and visceral details within their portraits, landscapes, and films.
Their work has been exhibited across the United States and internationally, and has been the subject of institutional solo exhibitions at MASS MoCA (2023); the Baltimore Museum of Art (2022); the Carnegie Museum of Art (2021); Public Art Fund (2019); and MoMA PS1 (2018). They were included in the 59th International Venice Biennale (2022), the Whitney Biennial (2019), and have been featured in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2022), Ballroom Marfa, Texas (2022), Renaissance Society, Chicago (2020); Barbican Centre, London (2020); and the Brooklyn Museum, New York (2019).
They have been an artist-in-residence at MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, Lightwork and a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 2023, PEREZ was the Abigail Cohen Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.
PEREZ is an Assistant Professor of Photography at the Yale School of Art. They have previously held appointments in the Art, Film, and Visual Studies department of Harvard University, Williams College, The Cooper Union, and taught photography at the Educational Alliance Art School in New York City. They were a Dean at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture from 2016 to 2021.
PEREZ’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, among others.
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