My mother lives in a dark apartment with beautiful things that are easily broken. I lived in this apartment with my mother, my grandmother before her passing, and eventually my stepfather as well. I was a child then. Lately, I find myself in my attachments to objects, corners of rooms, and the ways my body arranges itself comfortably or uncomfortably while visiting - and I make photographs. Sometimes I ask my mother and stepfather to be in the photographs. Sometimes we dress for our parts. Sometimes we make up stories about why. Sometimes only the apartment appears, the apartment and its objects. Sometimes traces of our Jewish ancestors appear, either in our bodies or otherwise.

I create fictions rooted in autobiography. These fictions are in dialogue with repertoires learned and rehearsed within legacies of myth, theater, and canon; as well as through the untraceability of embodied memory and inherited trauma. This investigation into lineages of familial domesticity questions how a home generates, spatializes, and entombs the conditions of whiteness, wealth, and gender. Because the work is about the plastic truths of the apartment, it is also about the things in the apartment, and the people who occupy the apartment – all of which respond in strange and careful ways as we circumnavigate each other in the play of our given domestic roles. At stake is the potential to fracture calcified molds, reenvision archetypes of enmeshment, and develop rituals of empathy across time, selves, and generations through the impossible practice of healing.

Alana Perino’s artistic practice engages the entanglements of home, family, and heritage.

Simultaneously an only child and the youngest of seven children, Alana grew up in New York City, the North Fork of Long Island, and the stretch of highway between the two. They studied European Intellectual History and Photography at Wesleyan University, where their questions concerning the nature of belonging were only further problematized. After working as a photojournalist in Israel / Palestine, skeptical of the privileged nature of their stay, Alana returned to the United States. They lived in California for eight years, crisscrossing the country to photograph "American" heritage sites. In the summer of 2021 they returned to the East Coast to photograph the people and places that raised them and to complete the MFA Photography program at RISD. Alana resides on the unceded land of the Pokanoket, Wampanoag and Narragansett in Providence, Rhode Island, where they currently serve as an Assistant Professor at Johnson & Wales University.

For more information:
Visit: www.alanaperino.com
Read the interview with Alana Perino