José Santiago Pérez: Space for Freedom. Written by Linda Marcus.

Featured image: José Santiago Pérez working in his studio. Photo Credit: Lunder Institute for American Art.

José Santiago Pérez’s artwork focuses on the body, time, and memory. Pérez is constantly investigating the relationship between materials and what it means to be human. His current body of work centers on baskets, their form and function. According to Pérez, “It’s what we come from. We come from a container or womb. There’s something so primal about being held”. The idea and function of a basket has been around for centuries. “It’s an incredibly spacious form that when I think about its history, it’s allowed human beings to create culture in a lot of ways. It’s been with us for a long time and it’s an extension of our body to do things like hold and gather and to store and to keep and give. I feel like those gestures or actions to me have a huge significance. It allows us to be human.”

Pérez is an artist and educator based in Chicago, Illinois. He teaches in the Fiber and Material Studies Department of the School of the Art Institute in Chicago where he also received his MFA. His work has been widely exhibited from Los Angeles to Boston and his work has been written about in multiple publications including Artform, Sixty Inches from Center, and New City Art. 

Pérez started his art practice in performance art but quickly made the connection between using his body and materials to create form. “It’s a kind of entanglement, a performance or choreography with the hands and the fingertips”, according to Pérez. Fiber-based art and techniques have long been relegated to “craft”. This unseen labor has only recently been given recognition in the fine art world. For Pérez, working with fiber techniques has always seemed comfortable. ” It’s a field that has been associated with female and female labor that has been devalued and unseen. But for me, I’ve always felt the most welcomed to. I have always felt very much at home,” says Pérez.

The forms he makes are repetitively woven together with one or more of five different colored plastic strands. The “artificial” shades of tangerine, mint, baby blue, lavender, and pink are a nod to his childhood in Los Angeles in the ’80s steeped in memories of summer camp, lanyards, and key chains. A time that brings joy and a sense of nostalgia to the work. 

Pérez says during this constant movement of return and retracing he doesn’t know exactly how the basket or form will come out. He doesn’t plan the shape and “meanders” and just “gets out of his own way”. It’s a true collaboration with him and the material by way of chance. “Improvisation allows me to dissolve a little bit, to sort of disappear and sort of relinquish control a little bit. For some that might be a source of anxiety, but for me, it creates a lot of space for freedom. I think that is what I am looking for”, according to the artist. 

While plastic mylar bags and plastic are a component of Pérez ‘s art, he says he’s not necessarily trying to make an environmental statement. Rather, he hopes by using this material, he calls attention to the earth as a container, one that is continually extracted from.  Pérez is hoping to get the public to question that extraction. To start the discussion, he creates an alluring aesthetic ” A moment of visual pleasure. I love how my work shimmers. I think shimmers create a headspace where it shakes up people’s thinking. It dissolves the binary thinking that we operate in. I’m placing faith in the optical experience. It creates a seduction where I hope people rethink containers, see containers differently, how amazing they are, and how much they can hold and gather. I think baskets remind us that we are always in a relationship with others”.

Visit josesantiagoperez.com to learn more and connect on Instagram at @ josesantiago.p.