George P. Perez received his BFA in 2014 from the University of Colorado, Boulder and currently resides in Denver. He was a resident artist at RedLine Contemporary Art Center from 2014 to 2016. He also completed a residency at the Denver Children’s Museum in January of 2018, where he created a collaborative artwork for the museum’s permanent collection. Perez is part of M12, an award-winning interdisciplinary group of artists that explores the aesthetics of rural cultures and landscapes. He has also served as a Photo Facilitator for the Berkeley, California-based group Working Assumptions.
As an artist, Perez often explores ephemera from daily life. Discarded photographs are his primary source material. He appropriates these images to create collages, installations, and sculptures. In the body of work he produced for the Octopus Initiative, he mined his archive of found photographs for those with stereotypical sentimental characteristics. He alternately undermines and emphasizes the photographs' nostalgic qualities by tearing, scanning, and rearranging them. As he understands it, this process is akin to textile weaving. The works explore the hackneyed conventions and personal nuances found in these inexpensive, increasingly anachronistic artifacts.