Humankind’s impact on the planet influences this art

At Kelowna’s Community Theatre, a unique art display has gone up in its Rise exhibition space as part of Art@KCT.

Over the past four years, Mackenzie Perras has been experimenting with a myriad of different materials to create unique pieces to represent the Anthropocene era.

“As humanity, we’ve created so much stuff… that it’s actually saturated the geological record,” Perras told Kelowna10. “Scientists now consider it a new era. The Anthropocene, the human era.”

Perras has been a professional artist for ten years, gaining an interest in the abstract due to the need to decode the meaning behind it, equating it to translating hieroglyphics as if he were Indiana Jones.

His paintings use man-made products, such as the eclectic ‘Supply Chain’, inspired by the start of COVID-19, when shelves were being stripped bare.

“I made this piece primarily out of textiles, so it’s made out of acrylic and polyester yarns. … I layered hundreds and hundreds of layers of paint over the yarn. Then using dentistry tools and other means of decay I slowly picked away all of the paint, echoing the shape of the yarn itself,” he explained. “I wanted to create a piece that expressed the ludicrous complexity of modernity, and I do think this is ludicrous.”

Throughout his experience creating these pieces, he said he became somewhat of an environmentalist, after all his research into man-made materials and seeing how many things we produce that do not decay.

“I would like people to think about the things we use every day and what their possible future is and where they’re headed,” he said.

Perras been awarded a residency by an art foundation in Germany, to produce a new series of works inspired by a year of research he did across Mexico and 31 archaeological sites he visited.

He invites anyone who would like to learn more about the process and ideas behind the pieces from ‘Tales from the Anthropocene’, to attend his lecture in conjunction with the exhibit called ‘Into Abstraction: Many ways of looking’ on Aug. 26 at 6 p.m.