The Passing of a Shadow, Dreamsong's first solo exhibition with California-based artist Fidencio Fifield-Perez (b. 1990, Oaxaca) features three temporally disparate bodies of work that display a continuity of material, approach and ideas. Taking the garden as a site of inspiration and meaning, the artist's collaged paintings, cut-paper weavings, and hand-drawn maps analogize the daily rituals of planting, gardening and growing to the networks of mutual care and support that sustain marginalized communities.
In a series of three new paintings incorporating collage, Fifield-Perez contrasts the verdancy of tropical houseplants with geometric motifs fashioned from cut paper. The exhibition's centerpiece, See My Brother, He's Jumping Out (2026) plays with negative space and perception. Transitions between paint and collage suggest absence, memory and longing, while cut paper sections appear almost as photo negatives of the acrylic painted plants that wind from the canvas's sapphire ground. Containing two concealed human legs that emerge from each side of the frame, the painting references the hidden labor, presence and movement of migrants within the United States, poignantly grappling with the pressure of trying to conceal oneself from a society that is paradoxically both intolerant of and reliant upon it.
A recent recipient of a houseplant cutting from the late California politician and gay rights activist Harvey Milk, Fifield-Perez's paintings and cut-paper compositions of plants situate the artist as a steward of sentiments and approaches inherited from his artistic and intellectual forebears. Celebrating how knowledge, advocacy and compassion are nurtured and shared within likeminded social groups, the vibrancy of these works indicates the vitality that results from careful dedication. The drops of water in the woven paper works Some Strange Rain (2021) and Wet Willow (2022) break down growth into its constituent components, and posit beauty as an accumulation of repeated gestures of care.
The artist's map works reference far more perilous and unwelcoming geographies. While at the Galveston Artist Residency in Texas, Fifield-Perez engaged in a long conversation about his personal life and artistic practice with a former member of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) who had interdicted migrants and their supplies along the country's southern border with Mexico. After this memorable meeting, the artist was gifted the former CBP officer's hand-drawn maps and notes about the border territory he had policed. Transposing elements of this hostile topology atop of chain-link fence-like interfacing fabric, Cross Stitch (2018) and Portrait Patrol (2017) explore the border's multiple, irreconcilable meanings by abstracting and altering its hazardous geography.
Like Harvey Milk's houseplant, the greenery Fifield-Perez shares by mail with family and friends, and the weavings he snips to size and pastes into his paintings, the artist’s practice is unified by the selectivity of its transposition. The act of cutting -- either to grow something anew, transform an image or remove information -- is the process by which the artist constructs the unlikely and unexpected. Named after the final line in Derek Jarman's film Blue (1993), The Passing of a Shadow also looks to Jarman's final book, a diary of the garden he tended in Kent until his premature death in 1994. Cultivated from an inhospitable landscape while Jarman lost friends, lovers and ultimately himself to HIV, Jarman created an Edenic world that defied the circumstances of his life and extracted beauty and wonder from hostile ground.
