Today we’d like to introduce you to Jess Peri
Hi Jess, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
My journey as a visual artist started in the North Texas area that I grew up. My interest in photography was somewhat a natural reaction to a world around me that was saturated with photographs. I picked my first camera up with intentionality in the mid-2000’s and have been digging and digging ever since regarding what the medium has to offer. At some point I realized the cameras capability to create art, and ever since have been bound and determined to challenge myself to continue to learn more about the photographic arts while trying to create my own individual expression with the almost 200-year-old medium. I ended up earning my BFA in Studio Art concentrating in photography in 2012 from the University of North Texas. After graduating I found a job as a guest service representative at the Sixth Floor Museum in Dealey Plaza, a museum in Dallas, TX honoring President John F. Kennedy. Working at the museum during the year of the 50th anniversary of President saw enormous crowds coming through the museum of people all over the world just to get a chance to look out the infamous window where allegedly the assassin sat. I found it fascinating to hear how many people would react to their experience at the museum by saying “this is very different than what I thought it would be like in person’. It was at that job that I started to become interested in photography’s and media’s ability to inform a collective memory, and how inaccurate it can be.
In 2015 my educational journey picked back up when I traversed the Llano Estacado to New Mexico where I was accepted by the University of New Mexico’s MFA program to study photography. It was in New Mexico I got my first chance to teach and saw a growth of my understanding of myself as an artist. My work, as it was before, was rooted deeply in place, or if it were put into a genre of art, landscape. My interpretation of the world around me deeply influences how I navigate it and interpret it, and these things have been associated with my work for a long time. After graduating from UNM in 2018, I got the chance to live and teach in Taos, New Mexico for a year (what an artist’s dream that was!). It was in Taos that I got the offer to come teach across the country to a state in which I had never been before: South Carolina.
Now having been in South Carolina for going on 5 years, I have become much more familiar with my new home. But moving here having never been was a challenge for me as an artist who makes work about place. I quickly got to know my new home by means that I know well: with my bike and camera. Much of the early work I made upon moving was me getting acquainted with the place, and as I learned more about the local ecology, the uniqueness of it, and in turn the unique issues the land scape faces these things started to influence my work. I became very interested in the Midlands area of South Carolina and it’s features such as wetland habitats that seem to define this place, especially compared to the desert that I had come from. My lens turned to these places and the themes of activism, ecology, and environmental awareness began to become more evident in my work.
Learning about the ecological challenges that these local wetlands face both inspired me to dedicate myself to exploring the subject but to also find an avenue for the work to function in the world. This culminated in a partnership with the Audubon Society of South Carolina that I am continuing to foster today. In 2024, in conjunction with a push to pass law protecting land in South Carolina, the South Carolina Audubon Society used my work in educational pushes relating to the law they were attempting to pass. Through the bill was shot down, to get to participate in somewhat of a political process was something that I never would have guessed my art would be a part of. I am continuing to make my work available to the Audubon Society to aid the work they do, and if my work can be a component of change, I look forward to seeing it function in this way.
As I write this, I am preparing to attend an exhibition of my work in Greenville, SC at the Tiger Strikes Asteroid Gallery. The show, called ‘Beyond the Surface’, is addressing water conservation issues here in the state of South Carolina, and is a group exhibition that will have a multimedia approach to the show, all thinking about water sustainability. As my work continues down a path such as it is, I can only hope that is continues to inspire change for a better, healthier future for us and our environment.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Garry Winogrand has a quote regarding this that goes along these lines: ‘You don’t become an artist because, you become an artist despite”.
The world tends to throw a lot at you when you try to achieve your goals. I feel very blessed in the fact that my interest are at the core of everything I do. Getting to a point where this was possible certainly had, and still has its challenges. Since graduating with my MFA I have applied to over 110 academic positions, of which I was interviewed for 2. Staying motivated while encountering so much rejection is hard. But I kept at it. Oh yeah there was also having to figure out how to teach during the covid pandemic. But that is life, it will always throw you curve balls.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I am at my core a lens-based artist. I am reluctant to say I am a photographer because of the variety of things that could mean. We encounter photography every single day, but most do not encounter art photography that often. I strive to be an artist that has few influences other than my own intuition influencing what I make, and I am proud that I have landed position teaching that I have because it allows me to be that kind of artist. I seek to use my work outside of the context of commercial or professional photography and seeing my latest work function in the world is another thing that I am proud of as of lately.
Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc?
Books: Rebecca Solnit- Wanderlust, Terry Barrett- Criticizing Photographs, Susan Sontag- Where Stress Falls, John Graves- Goodbye to a River
Podcast: The Cycling Podcast, Radio Lab
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.jessperi.com
