Pat Perry (b. Michigan, 1991) is an American visual artist primarily painting, drawing, photographing, and installing large-scale outdoor mural installations.
Throughout the 2010’s, a series of sketchbooks and photos documenting years of traveling itinerantly around the United States, accidentally became some of Perry’s most well-known works. Simultaneously, his large-scale works and posters have called attention to various social causes through collaborations with groups such as the Beehive Design Collective, AptArts, No More Deaths, and the UN High Commissioner For Refugees.
In 2018, Perry’s largest body of paintings debuted as a solo exhibition titled, National Lilypond Songs at UICA in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In early 2020, several of the works were exhibited alongside new works in a solo exhibition titled, Song and Dance at Takashi Murakami’s Hidari Zingaro gallery in Tokyo.
Perry’s ongoing series of Recital works use a fictional group of performers to animate the social and emotional effects of 21st century technologies, as well as the epistemic limits of individual meaning-making. The works include paintings, drawings, and installations of life-size performers on interstate medians and roadsides throughout the Midwest. Pat works and lives in a small downtown neighborhood on Detroit’s East Side.
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Signed and numbered by the artist.
This drawing was the first of what turned into a whole series, exhibited in January in Japan:
“These pictures depict different sorts of imagined pageants and different sorts of imagined performers. The images aren’t meant to be total and aren’t meant to articulate the whole story arc of each recital. Rather, they’re snapshots from mid-recital, or from solitary performances to no one, or from scenes just before or after.
The pageants are strange attempts by the performers to make a coherent story out of a confusing world. The company of performers (like us) doesn’t exist in a logical world, but rather an emotional world based on stories. They congregate into a group that shares a similar story. And in both these worlds (theirs and ours), there are blind spots, limits to what we can know, and a mortally short amount of time to sort things out. But the meaning-making is mostly what I’m interested in here. The show is called Song and Dance, like the idiom, “a long and complicated statement or story, sometimes one that is not true.”
Deep down, I hoped the pictures would fixate on the desire for two things; comradery, and some feeling of clarity. Both of which, in reality, feel intermittent and short-lived. Or to put it another way, to feel like you understand what your life means, and to feel like you’re not alone as you go through it. If this all sounds a little lofty, not to worry; the performers in the drawings don’t look like they’re taking themselves nearly as seriously as I sound like I am.” Pat Perry
