Jon Perez uses sound, film, and video to explore formal abstraction in the material processes of moving images. He creates single channel works as well as multi-channel installations. Perez carries out all aspects of his works from conception through shooting, editing and sound design. His work seeks to negotiate the transformation of material form into consciousness through the calculated manipulation of glitches, lens aberrations, and long exposures. From Liverpool, New York, he has a BFA in Film from the University of Central Florida (2012). He is currently an MFA candidate in Art Video at Syracuse University.

Perez’s work seeks to mitigate the divide present in the ordinary experience between the domains of material processes and sensory perception. He states that form itself can emerge spontaneously from intensive differences in the material world such as pressure, temperature or density. Perez’s practice is the location and articulation of the moving image’s equivalent properties. Viewers of his work alternate between different depths of field, planes of spatial or temporal focus, necessarily orientating themselves to that which is most present. Perez explores forms severed from traditional representational models. The resulting images are often blurred, dirty, elliptical and abstract–there is an alien permeability and fluidity between the original captured material, and the material positioned to be re-experienced. Perez is interested in the transfiguration of code into visual material. His goal is to fundamentally effect the viewer by introducing, exploiting and controlling digital video glitches such that semantic information is rearranged into visual abstraction with the hope that each new contact with our world renews and opens us into new dimensions of becoming.

Perez’s recent screenings include the GLI.TC Festival, the Vancouver DSLR Film Festival, the 13th Annual Artsfest Film Festival (Leeds, UK), the Landlocked Film Festival “Cherry Kino” Saltaire Super 8 Programme, and the Kaunas Biennial (Lithuania)

Light in Extension, Absolute Domain, 2011, 15 minutes 43 seconds

A corrupted bootleg video becomes an abstract flow of misinterpreted code. At one time, the file was “correctly” arranged into a representationally understandable body. Now, after its original code has been rearranged and infected, it pulses, falls apart, and begins to express itself not as a new form, but in the form of something new.

Phase Space (silent), 2012, 20 minutes

The practice of making moving images is largely a practice of assembling ordered frames of specific difference sequentially so as to simulate previous movements undertaken by the body. It is an act of remembering, and as in all acts of remembering, time itself is vulnerable. It is liable to drift, blur and disintegrate. In Phase Space, the time captured within each frame is exaggerated, dilated and stretched, transfiguring the body’s movement into a movement of bodies.

Courtesy of the artist

Curated by Tom Sherman