Dina Perlasca ( she/her )

Artist Statement

My artistic practice is motivated by the need to articulate what I carry forth from my ancestral past and what I create from my own contemporary desire, as I generate a custom-made future of my own design. All aspects of my artworks are *custom-made* for the specific purpose of reimagining domestic standard systems and constructing tailored ones. Whether as simple as a shelf, or as involved as a house, we all have a desire to arrange our personal spaces according to our own tastes: a motivation connected to our personal psychological, emotive, and aesthetic concerns.

The work is for myself, for my children, for my people, for future generations and for those that can find comfort in the familial aspects of the visual aesthetics of my designs. My practice is greatly inspired by my personal Mexican upbringing; equally influenced by the folk art of central Mexico where my grandparents settled, and the domestic aesthetics of borderland living between Mexico and the United States. Generated from these experiences, my work possesses encoded knowledge that creates an in-between, surreal environment birthing a *culture of its own*. In many of my installations, Mexican brutalist architecture confronts domestic interior design aesthetics, and creates familiar, uncanny spaces where the viewer can observe the psychological connections between the disparate elements of the artworks.

Bio

Dina Perlasca is a Mexican American artist from The Paso del Norte Region, where she grew up on the Border of Mexico and the U.S. in El Paso TX and Cd. Juarez Mexico. Dina lives in El Paso Texas with her 3 children. She obtained her BFA in Ceramics form The University of Texas at El Paso and her MFA in Ceramics at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces NM. She is currently teaching undergraduate ceramics at The University of Texas at El Paso. Perlasca has exhibited regionally and nationally and holds the Student At Large position for the 2021 – 2023 National Council on Education for the Ceramics Arts (NCECA).