Artist Spotlight: Ivan Perera's Celebration of Life, Death, and Memory

Cuban multi-media artist Ivan Perera recently completed his residency at Miami’s El Espacio 23, a contemporary art space and private museum founded by philanthropist and art collector Jorge M. Pérez.

Perera’s work spans several media, including photography, book arts, installations, and drawings. What makes Perera’s work noticeably striking is its deep connection to the human experience; it celebrates life, death, and the legacy of stories left behind us. Behind each of his works is a sort of specter, or haunting of something supernatural and intangible that connects people in a way that transcends space and time. Influenced by literature, Perera’s work often has a narrative element or hints at the story of our lives as we move toward the unknown. 

Many of Perera’s works involve books and repurposing book covers to convey different messages. A number of these are grounded in a sense of duality, represented not only in the book covers themselves — that is, the relationship between front and back, beginning and end, etc. — but in words, ideas, and objects threaded into, or placed onto, the cover that reflect the artist’s understanding of everyday events or internal thoughts. The result becomes a new story for Perera, occupying the space where there were once pages filled with words. His work Fragile Time (2023), for example, shows this in its most basic form, where the words “Pasado” (past) and “Futuro” (future) are connected by threads within the internal space of the book. Yet the past, manifested in black thread, takes the tangled, long, and complex path to reach the future, something that a viewer has likely also experienced on their own winding path of life. This duality is also apparent in Fragile Reading (2018), where the terms “Cordura” (sanity) and “Locura” (insanity) are on the front and back covers, respectively. These opposites are connected gently by one thread, balancing each other and holding each other in check. 

Perera’s residency at El Espacio 23 also reunited him with one of his larger and most powerful works from 2017, displayed in the museum’s main gallery. The installation, titled Todo lo sólido desvanece en el aire, or “Everything solid melts into air,” is a true celebration of life, community, and our existence. The work comprises a series of small objects — amulets, keychains, pendants, religious items, or other small tokens — hung on the wall. Each of these objects is connected to a nylon string that, all together, hold up a stone from a column of the collapsed Church of El Carmelo in Havana. 

The rock is suspended in mid-air, and from far enough away, the nylon threads make it appear it is simply floating over the gallery floor. The only hint of its support is the subtle shadows on the wall. Upon closer examination, however, it becomes clear that each thread, and in turn each amulet, plays an essential role in supporting the rock, though seemingly effortlessly. 

Everything solid is a work with many layers, and each gets to the crux of different relationships one has with the world around them. Each amulet connects the person who gifted it to Perera to their own belief systems and ideas, as each object is charged with meaning, whether religious, a memory, a familial significance, or something more profound and unknown. Each belief system is then grounded in the physical place — the church — often associated with community gatherings and given orthodoxies. From many different individual starting points, there is one rock. But, simultaneously, each amulet is connected to the others, following the threads from the wall, through the rock, and back to the amulets themselves. In the words of Perera himself, “The rock […supplants] the social body while becoming a starting point for discourse on memory, history as a tool of power, religious faith, death, and existence.” The installation begs the question, who are we? What is our role in the world around us? And what do we leave behind when we’re gone?

As a whole, Perera’s work celebrates the subtleties of the universe and the connections we do not often notice or think to pay attention to. From playful semantics to entire belief structures, Perera isn’t afraid to put everything on the table when it comes to dissecting and understanding the intricacies of the world around us.

Artist Spotlight: Ivan Perera's Celebration of Life, Death, and Memory