About Michelle La Perrière
A native of Denver, Colorado, Michelle La Perrière knew she would be an artist as a child. She has lived in Maryland since 1987, when she moved to Baltimore for graduate study with Grace Hartigan at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). Her drawings, paintings, prints and mixed media collages combine image fragments from visual source materials with observed and imagined forms and spaces. Her work has been shown in the United States, France and Japan, and is in private and public collections including Syracuse University and the Borg-Warner Corporation.
Beginning her studies at The University of Colorado, Boulder, and Parsons School of Design, New York, she went on to receive her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has received Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Mayor’s Advisory Council on Art and Culture, numerous MICA faculty development grants, and MICA’s award for Excellence in Teaching. Selected residencies include the Jentel Artist Residency, Banner, Wyoming (twice), The Hambidge Center for the Arts and Sciences, Rabun Gap, Georgia, The Millay Colony for the Arts, Austerlitz, New York, and The International Program for Artists in Rochefort en Terre, Brittany, France. She has been teaching at MICA since 1992, and served as Co-Chair of the Foundation Department for ten years (2000 to 2010).
ARTIST STATEMENT
Using paint, graphite, collage, and sometime installation, I examine the interweaving of past, present and future. Dream and remembrance, joy and grief, hope and despair are dance partners on my canvas.
I examine the interwoven existence of past, present and future, of dream and despair, of grief and healing, of concurrent absence and presence. complexity.
With drawing, painting, and sometimes collage, I explore the interwoven existence of dream and reality, pleasure and longing, absence and presence.
Images culled from contemporary catalogues and magazines are frequently incorporated with those from old children’s books, art historical references, landscapes and objects from observation. The final work becomes an amalgam of time and place; a fusion of the ordinary and unexpected.
I examine the interwoven existence of past, present and future, of dream and reality despair, of grief and healing, of concurrent absence and presence.
I explore the nebulous places where the internal world and the external world meshes and sifts, where thoughts and emotions shimmer with event and object, with weather and caress…
Combining aspects of images culled from contemporary catalogues and magazines with those appropriated from art historical references, bits and pieces of old children’s books, ephemera, and landscapes from observation and memory, I draw, paint, and at times incorporate objects on canvas and paper.
I am captivated by the varying ways we assimilate and disassociate, by those things which give our lives meaning (tangible and not, shared collectively and not), which land us smack in the heart of the moment, while also connecting us with what went before, and giving a sense of hope and possibility.