Landscapes for a Dead Animal

6x7 Analogic 
2003

ICP New York
Kustera Tilton Gallery. NY.
PHE06 Madrid

Landscapes for a dead animal.
Robert Knafo.

Iván Pérez ismaking a claim to the stages and consumers of public spectacle. He is fascinated by the rituals and ritualization of sight-seeing, the act of beholding - whether natural tableauxor man-made objects of wonder. For this series of photographs taken in 2004 during a residency in New York, Pérez visited the city's great zoos and botanical gardens, and trained his camera on people looking. Everyone in these pictures is captured in states of enthralment, or at least absorption. Pérez is interested not in individual psychology; but rather in the process by which we are transformed into visual consumers. In their intent captivation before and within so many simulations, microcosms, and dioramas of nature, the people in Pérez's photographs look as if they're satisfying a basic, even an unconscious, desire. Often seen through veils of foliage and sheets of glass, or from the back, or faraway, the viewers themselves are subsumed and even seemingly dissolved within great lush machines of visual seduction.



Art critic/independent curator and the producer of studiovisit.net and New art TV.