Ryan Perez (Oceanside, CA. 1982) identifies as both Filipino and Mexican and developed most of his ideas around art and photography from his experience living in Southern California — between the Inland Empire and the San Gabriel Valley. As an artist who works primarily with photography, Perez notes that it’s now impossible to look without seeing an invisible frame — looking is always in reference to something else. Through this photographic logic, the history of the camera’s viewfinder is in reference to its imperialist creators, and it, as a literal frame of origin, has minted an image culture that uses the frame to reinforce a logic of social importance and power — capitalism. For Perez, the active state of looking into the distance will always activate this invisible frame.  At the core, there is abstraction, and it occurs when the ground under one’s feet feels different from what the eye sees, perceives, imagines, and desires. As the seeing eye intersects the natural ground with a geopolitical landscape, that body's position as beholder is still understood through an imperial gaze. This invisible frame is the waking, imagined, dreaming, and sleeping process of coloniality. 

Perez’s work has been exhibited at sites including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The UC Riverside Sweeney Art Gallery; The California Museum of Photography, UC Riverside, Ca; Yautepec Gallery, Mexico City, Mexico; C24 Gallery, NY, NY; Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles; Samuel Freeman Gallery, Los Angeles; The Fulcrum Press, Los Angeles, Control Room, Los Angeles, and The Brand Library Art Gallery, Glendale, CA.

Perez's studio is in Monrovia, Ca, and he teaches at ArtCenter College of Design.