Rachel Perry
New work by artist Rachel Perry will be presented at Yancey Richardson, opening on January 11 and on view through February 17, 2024. The exhibition, Unfolded, includes photography from Perry’s ongoing series, Lost in My Life, (2009-present), featuring the artist physically immersed in the materials with which she creates her other works of art. Unfolded also premieres Perry’s series of minimalist needlepoints on canvas made during the pandemic. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, January 11 from 6:30 – 8:30 PM.
In her eighth solo exhibition at Yancey Richardson, Perry continues her wry examination of the cycles of consumerism, excavating and elevating humble materials that are “at hand” in her day-to-day domestic life. Lost in My Life is part performance and part installation where Perry submerges herself in environments built entirely from familiar, discarded materials such as dry goods containers. As such, Lost in My Life, is an ironic take on the often-suffocating cycle of purchasing, collecting, and eventual purging. While Perry is pictured in every image, she never reveals her face, emphasizing the dichotomy between personal identity and the anonymity of consumer habits.
The stitched canvases featured in Unfolded were conceived during Covid lockdown at a time when Perry was at home with limited resources—not an unfamiliar experience for Perry who has historically repurposed disposable wrappings as part of her artistic practice. Perry unfolded cardboard boxes from common consumer products such as lipstick, chocolate bars and vanilla extract.
With each flattened box, she borrows the shape, which she then depicts in needlepoint. Devoid of its branding and packaging, each box is transformed into a simplified shape. These stitched objects then act as subjects in her photography studio, where she captures self-portraits alongside her odes to forgotten reminders of consumerism, commenting quietly about the effects of capitalist production.
Perry’s new series of stitched canvases highlights the traditionally female history of needlework, calling attention to the domestic craft’s undervalued status and reclaiming it as a feminist medium. “Drawing from contemporary consumer culture, my nonfunctional stitching gives attention to our relationships with consumable images and objects, revealing the unfamiliar,” Perry notes.
Rachel Perry’s work is held in numerous public collections including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Mass. Baltimore Museum of Art, and Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Archives, Boston. She has had solo exhibitions at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where she was Artist-in-Residence in 2014; the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, Mass.; Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University; The Drawing Center, New York; and Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany. Perry has received four fellowships from MacDowell and is a three-time recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Award for Excellence, the only artist in its history to win in three separate disciplines: photography, drawing, and sculpture. She lives and works in Boston.