Perez-Tlatenchi’s multidisciplinary practice explores how migration, cultural exchange, and collective memory shape the ways communities understand themselves and their surroundings. Grounded in the intercultural landscape of Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, his work draws from diasporic histories, urban visual culture, archival research, and personal experience. Moving between photography, painting, printmaking, collage, video, and installation, he examines how histories are carried across generations and geographies, and how their traces remain embedded within contemporary life.

Collage functions as both a material process and a conceptual framework throughout Perez-Tlatenchi’s practice. Through layering, fragmentation, repetition, and accumulation, he brings together images and visual languages that originate from distinct cultural and historical contexts. These juxtapositions resist a singular or linear reading of history. Instead, they reveal memory and identity as continually evolving constructions shaped by circulation, translation, loss, and reinterpretation.

As the artist explains, his work is driven by an interest in “layering knowledge, circulating images, segmenting landscapes, and fragmenting compositions.” This approach allows seemingly disparate narratives to intersect within a single work. Photographs, printed matter, street imagery, and archival fragments are reorganized into compositions that shift according to light, scale, material, and the viewer’s perspective. Images may appear partially obscured, repeated, or transformed, reflecting the instability of historical narratives and the difficulty of separating the past from its present-day consequences.

Perez-Tlatenchi’s research frequently considers the remnants of former empires and the systems of global exchange they established. Rather than approaching colonial history as distant or resolved, he examines how its structures persist in the organization of cities, the circulation of commodities and images, and the lived experiences of diasporic communities. His work attends to the subtle ways these histories surface within ordinary environments, transforming familiar materials and visual references into sites of inquiry.

Across his installations, individual images become part of larger spatial and perceptual systems. Photography may operate as an object rather than solely as a representation, while painted, printed, and projected elements complicate the boundaries between medium and surface. These layered environments ask viewers to move between fragments and perspectives, mirroring the process through which cultural memory is assembled, transmitted, and revised.

Our Foundation’s grant, together with residency support from The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, will provide Perez-Tlatenchi with dedicated studio time and resources to deepen his research and develop a new body of ambitious, large-scale work. This support will allow him to expand the physical and conceptual scale of his practice while entering a period of focused experimentation, reflection, and long-term artistic development.