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Sondra Perry

She // Her // Hers
They // Them // Theirs

New Media and Installation Artist

Newark, New Jersey

Sondra, a Black woman with an afro, smiles and stands in front of a beige stone wall. She wears glasses and a blue and grey striped turtleneck sweater.

Photo courtesy of the artist.

Sondra Perry makes videos, performances, and installations that foreground digital tools as a way to critically reflect on new technologies of representation and remobilize their potential. Her works examine how images are produced in order to reveal the way photographic representations are captured and re-circulated. Perry was born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, raised in New Jersey and North Texas, and has lived and worked in Newark, New Jersey since 2019. She received her MFA from Columbia University in 2015 and her BFA from Alfred University in 2012.

Perry’s solo exhibitions include Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland; Luma Westbau, Zürich; Institute of Contemporary Art Miami; Disjecta, Portland; Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London; Seattle Art Museum; Squeaky Wheel, Buffalo; The Kitchen, New York; and Institute for New Connotative Action, Seattle. Perry has participated in residencies at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, RECESS, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Ox-bow, Vermont Studio Center, and the Experimental Television Center.

Donor -The Knight Arts + Tech Fellowship is supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

This artist page was last updated on: 08.07.2024

Media
A pyramid vitrine lays on its side shrouded in darkness. Inside the vitrine is an illuminated collage of railroad nails, shackles, and various metals.

you out here look n like you don't belong to nobody: heavy metal and reflective by Sondra Perry, 2019. HD video on monitor, SD video on TFT LCD with sound, iron casting crucible, 7 pound sad irons, railroad spikes, 18th–19th century crab rattle shackles, 18th–19th century shackles, Campo del Cielo iron meteorites, black iron oxide, red iron oxide, 1-Octen-3-ol, web cameras, hard drives, SD card readers, audio and video cables, water, dimensions variable. Installation at The Shed, New York.

Photo by Dan Bradica and Gregory Carideo; courtesy of the artist.

A refurbished interstellar backhoe outfitted with a bucket loader, three LCD monitors, multiple pairs of headphones, and long, spindly legs sits in the center of the gallery. The wall to the left displays a video projection of a 3D rendered ocean and the wall to the right displays a projected red orb.

Eclogue for [In]habitability by Sondra Perry, 2017. 3 channel video projection, backhoe, three channel synced monitor video, and sound. Installation at the Seattle Art Museum.

Photo by Natali Wiseman.

A CGI depiction of a bald Black woman stares outward looking past the viewers. Her mouth is slightly open, and the image is cropped just above her shoulders. Behind the figure is an abstract orange background resembling cracked amber.

Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation (video still) by Sondra Perry, 2016. Video and bicycle workstation, 9 minutes, 5 seconds.