Tom Bradley International Terminal (Terminal B)

For artist Sondra Perry, technology is a lens through which we can perceive new dimensions of our lived experiences. Her media and sculpture installations peel back layers of social conditioning to reveal vivid and vulnerable portraits of Blackness manifested in digital space. Perry learned this method of exposure, in part, from her mother, a medical image analyst who for years examined body ailments using x-ray film projected across multiple monitor workstations.

Typhoon Coming On (2021) consists of two monumental lenticular panels. One image of the composite is a digital rendering of J.M.W. Turner’s 1840 painting Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On). The second image focuses on the ocean in Turner’s painting, which Perry has manipulated using Blender Software’s ocean modifier tool—an open-source graphics program used to create 3D renderings of oceans. Perry’s purple ocean hue is the result of an error message, signaling that the graphics program is missing a file. We can equate this with an error in the algorithm of humanity that resulted in the transatlantic slave trade, and its continued impact on the lives of people of the African diaspora. By returning the image of the slave ship to the ocean, Perry completes, and complicates, our memories of the mighty Atlantic, and honors the millions of men and women who have been moved over oceans by will or by force.

Your own movements up, down, and around the main hall will activate Perry’s lenticular panels into a multidimensional rolling body of water. Her intention is for you to become immersed in the history on display: to feel yourself as part of the ocean or on the ship. From this position, you might ask yourself and those around you: “How are we all going to get free, together?”

 

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