(An)Other: As If I Don’t Know My Name

(An)Other: As If I Don’t Know My Name presents a body of work that reconfigures images from the artist’s family photo archive alongside images from broader Black cultural and visual histories. Family photographs, racialized imagery, and images of violence, joy, and intimacy are removed from their original contexts and reworked to examine how Black identities and histories are constructed, disrupted, and reclaimed.

Through this process, images created to document, categorize, or harm Black bodies are repurposed and reassembled, shifting their function and how they are encountered. By altering the relationships between images, the work interrupts familiar ways of seeing and challenges the conditions under which these images were produced and circulated.

The work is made using solvent and gel medium transfers. Each image is handled repeatedly through rubbing, pressure, lifting, and erosion. This physically intensive process introduces abrasion, loss of detail, tearing, and partial failure, with the final image shaped by material resistance and physical limits rather than an emphasis on perfection or legibility.

The resulting material instability reflects the delicacy of memory and historical record, allowing images to exist in states of partial visibility and loss. Through reworking and reconstruction, the work considers freedom as a practice enacted through physical intervention, and what it means to claim authorship over images that were never meant to be held, protected, or reimagined.

Instagram: @perea.photo

Website: https://www.louieperea.com