Portfolio: Perry Vasquez

Flaming Palm Tree, 2016, oil on canvas, 30 x 30 in.

[Image description: A palm tree against a blue sky. The palm’s fronds are burning with billowing orange flames while smoke rises upward.]

Perry Vasquez's expansive artistic practice juxtaposes myth and politics. Vazquez's series Under the Perfect Sun presents both the utopian mirage and the dystopian inferno of Southern California. On a background that evokes the perfect Californian sunset, blue skies, or a smog-ridden expanse stands the palm tree, the quintessential Southern California plant. A stark counterpart to the horizontal orientation of both the region’s plein-air landscape tradition and most Euro-American landscapes, the series presents in a vertical orientation. This formal device invokes the Catholic icon, both creating an anthropomorphizing effect and suggesting the palm tree’s “iconic” status.

The construction of the California mythos includes the importation of natural resources, including the palm tree. Besides the Washingtonia filifera (native only to the desert), all Southern California palm trees are imported, as is the vast amount of water needed to grow them. Dislodging this signifier from the California myth is the fulcrum of Vasquez's visual argument; it deliberately creates a dissonance between two iconic evocations of Southern California, the palm tree and the seasonal wildfire. Recent fire patterns demonstrate that the rise of seasonal fires has less to do with natural causes and more to do with the consequences of population density— such as power line ignitions from neglected infrastructure— confirming the failure of the mythic construction of the perfect, easy California lifestyle.

Incongruence between the image and mythos of San Diego is made even more specific by the work’s title, Under the Perfect Sun, which borrows that of a 2003 book by Mike Davis, Kelly Mayhew, and Jim Miller. This influential text posits an alternative history that deconstructs the mythology of San Diego as "America's Finest City” to reveal a highly segregated and militarized region whose political structure is dominated by private wealth.

Vasquez's fascination with the California myth is rooted in the intersection of his lived experience, historical memory, and the underbelly of this complicated historical narrative. Just as the concept of "perfect sun" is an illusory one, full of potential boon and bane, the palm trees signify a siren call to false promises inherent in the myth of San Diego since its inception. The cognitive dissonance in the image of the palm tree on fire incites a disruption of an oasis myth as the image presents both the California dream and nightmare.

— Eun Jung Park, Ph.D., Professor of Art History, Southwestern College

The Warmth of the Sun, 2018, oil on canvas, 72 x 22 in.

[Image description: Silhouettes of two palm trees against a lavender and pink sky. The taller tree on the left is on fire, with yellow flames toward the bottom of the trunk and at the top of the trunk, underneath the fronds. The shorter tree on the right is not on fire.]

La Jolla Shores I, 2018, oil on canvas, 72 x 22 in.

[Image description: A palm tree— burning orange in the center of its fronds— against a bright blue sky.]

Under the Perfect Sun, 2017, oil on canvas, 72 x 22 in.

[Image description: A palm tree in front of an ocean expanse and a blue sky. The tree’s fronds are on fire, with a plume of black smoke. Ashes fall downward.]

Sorrento Valley, 2018, oil on canvas, 72 x 22 in.

[Image descriptions: A palm tree in front of a blue sky. The tree has three gray cell phone receptor boxes among the fronds, which are on fire.]

Navajo Dr., 2018, oil on canvas, 50 x 16 in.

[Image description: A palm tree in front of a blue sky. One small section of a frond on the right is aflame.]

Pau-wai, 2018, oil on canvas, 50 x 16 in.

[Image description: A palm tree against a blue sky. Among the fronds are yellow cell phone receptor boxes, one of which is on fire and emitting a billow of smoke.]