I grew up in the Inland Empire. It's the largest county in the United States, and except for coastal lines, it’s a concentrated region in Southern California that encompasses a familiar image of the US — people, land, economy, authoritarianism, and spirituality. This complex landscape and exercising the in-betweenness of being Filipino and Mexican are core to my ability to form inquiries within my work. However, it’s not that my work is about these subjects specifically, but how simultaneously encountering my ancestry through the landscape while also encountering the Inland Empire formed an outlook where the imposition of “truth” in the body and land is suspect and not an authenticator of knowledge or experience. This formative exercise in thinking developed my sensibility to imagine possibilities in existence and survival, and not necessarily separate, but of topic — art.  

If truth is no longer the goal, my story doesn't need to be better than yours for you to listen. If collaboration in conversation is the goal, our coming together becomes about approaching knowledge and exploring possibilities. I make photographs to share what I’m seeing, looking at, thinking about, sensing, or provoking. I engage the photograph not to seek truths but to engage possibilities in meaning through the conventions of the tool itself and the photograph’s objecthood relative to spacetime. In my work, there is a disconnect between how I imagine myself in the landscape and living within a complex matrix of social conditions and histories. The camera can point at imagined narratives of aesthetic power, capitalism, war, colonization, unrest, life & death, all else unknowingly buried in the ground we sow. 

Ryan Perez (b. 1982, Oceanside, CA) makes photographs, sculptures, and videos. His 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; Phase Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Yautepec Gallery, CD, MX; C24 Gallery, NY, NY; Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles; Samuel Freeman Gallery, Los Angeles; The Fulcrum Press, Los Angeles, Ca; Control Room, Los Angeles, Ca; and The Brand Library Art Gallery, Glendale, CA. 

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