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Biography

Rachel Perry’s varied practice includes installation, sculpture, performance, photography, painting, and drawing. In response to trends she observes within contemporary culture, Perry often reconstitutes everyday materials in her work, such as supermarket labels, receipts, twist ties, and fruit stickers. Through reorganizing this material and the experiences of her daily life in visually surprising ways, Perry addresses a range of issues relating to consumerism and the business of living.

 

Her interest in how we consume, sort, process, and sift information is apparent in the series Lost in my Life (2009-2012). These photographic self-portraits present Perry camouflaged in a space made from the materials taken from other bodies of her work, such as collections of cereal boxes, takeout containers, and aluminum foil. Both humorous and visually alluring, these photographs also speak to the ubiquity of consumer culture in today’s world. Her most recent series, Chiral Drawings (2014-2016), began as an attempt to make a drawing using every single pen, pencil, crayon, and marker that she owns. Limiting her expression to a single line with each implement, made with her left hand and then her right, the works have a mesmerizing quality, evoking measurements of time, such as seismographs or EKGs. As with Lost in my Life, in Chiral Drawings Perry reveals poetic qualities within seemingly mundane materials. 

Rachel Perry’s work is held in numerous public collections including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts; the Baltimore Museum, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Archives, Boston. She has had solo exhibitions at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where she was Artist-in-Residence in 2014; the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum; the Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University; The Drawing Center, New York; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; and the Beatriz Esguerra Gallery, Bogotà, Colombia.
 
Perry has received four fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and is a three-time recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Award for Excellence, the only artist in its history to win in three separate disciplines: Photography, Drawing, and Sculpture. She been reviewed in Art in America, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Art:21, Sculpture, and created a four-page pictorial essay for Vogue. She has twice been commissioned by The New York Times Magazine, most recently for a feature on the “Me Too” movement.
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