Fourteen unique selenium-toned photograms, each 16”x20,” and accompanying text, 2023. They number 1-13 plus one unnumbered.

Each rayograph has its own text that corresponds to it.

Forty-six 35mm black and white photographs, each 8 x 10 inches

The photo series 100 Seconds to Midnight (2021) depicts, in unassuming black and white photographs, pictures of homes that have underground bunkers. Much of the tract housing in the Los Angeles area built between the late 1940s to the early 1970s had an option to add a nuclear bomb shelter to its basic design. Many of these bunkers have been subsequently repurposed as storage or wine cellars. Contemporary home construction also incorporates subterranean space as potential shelter from a wide range of potential disasters. The inclusion of underground space is no longer a basic basement, but a luxury for wealthy buyers who want the option to sequester themselves from the world for a period of time.

I began this photo series in July 2020 when I saw a real estate listing for a patch of desert about two hours outside Los Angeles. The ad showed two images: a flat steel plate in the ground and a dark, empty underground room with cinder block walls. I drove out to see the property, bumping down dirt roads to find a patch of unspectacular scrubland with a large and heavy locked steel door in the sand. To me, this space became replete with narratives, dreams, and speculation. As a result, I decided to continue my journeys like a stubbornly analog Google Street View, taking straightforward, unassuming images of the straightforward, unassuming homes that concealed their mysterious spaces behind placid, sunny facades.

This project was first exhibited in the solo show “Maelstrom,” at Pitzer College Galleries, Claremont, CA, in 2021

Pitzer Exhibition

Maelstrom Film

There are 139 monoprints in this series. Each 5x7,” ink on paper, 2020.

I started making these prints during lockdown in fall 2020 in Los Angeles. I had been thinking about the people I had met during my travels in the production of BUNKER and also about the steel panel in the ground hiding an underground bunker I had seen out in Landers, California. There is a photograph of that heavy steel plate as the anchor image for the photo series “100 Seconds to Midnight.”

I was interested in the fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper that Ed Peden had told me when I was visiting him in his subterranean New Age missile silo outside Topeka Kansas for the film BUNKER. But I also wanted to make images of creatures that lived close to the ground in the desert outside of Los Angeles. So I chose the Gambel’s Quail, which stays earthbound to hide and shelter its young. I made monoprints of the desert grasshopper, the harvester ant, Gambel’s Quail and the steel panel in the desert landscape. Over and over again.

Later, in January 2021 during a residency at BOXOProjects in Joshua Tree, I came back to these monoprints and included them in my film Sunspots (2021).

Bunker Film

100 Seconds to Midnight

Twenty-six resin sculptures for installation based on three miniature crystals I found at the Mount Ida World Championship Crystal Dig in October 2017.

Each piece approximately 12”x6,” 2018-present. There are three shape templates and each piece is individually tinted; no two are the same.

Images here are a sample of the full series. Clear crystals are the three templates based on my tiny discoveries.

455 drawings, ink on watercolor paper, each 4”x6”

Installation dimensions variable in size and number.

The Long Sleepers drawings are based on film frames from a 3-minute film 16mm I made called The Crystal King (2016). That film portrayed a tour through a show cave called Ohio Caverns, outside Columbus. Ohio Caverns has been leading people through winding underground paths ever since the late 19^th century, when a farmhand fell into a sinkhole on a summer day and discovered the untouched rooms clustered with ancient stalactites and stalagmites. Later that same year the cavern was open for paying tourists to come gawk at the underground wonders.

I made the film and then begin drawing. As the film played, I paused whenever a frame appeared that looked intriguing. Then I tried to draw what I saw in simple silver and cyan ink. So there is a pattern in the way these drawings repeat, but no fixed system that they follow. The drawings reflect a subjective path worn through a landscape of repetition. The installation you see here represents a small grouping of the over 450 drawings in the series.

Oilstick on watercolor paper

Multiple series available ranging in size from 9x12’ through 34x48”

Based on Henri Bergson’s metaphor of duration as he expresses it through the ability to perceive the color orange, the Cadmium Drawings series explores the varying resonances of cadmium red, orange, and yellow through application of commercially available oilsticks. This results in highly textured monochromes that show the arbitrariness of color designation and perception.

The full work of 100 Sinkholes also comprises one hundred ink drawings of abstracted, miniaturized, colorful sinkholes arranged in a grid on the freestanding wall, behind which a film loop of the same images hand-animated in black and white 16mm graphic animation runs incessantly.

In the film 100 Sinkholes, I methodically and systematically catalogued one hundred individual sinkholes, sourced from online data. The film renders these images in graphite, each insistently filling the emptiness of the void. As a sinkhole emerges, it quickly disappears into the unsteady rhythm of the animation.

The film scholar Joshua Guilford recently wrote about 100 Sinkholes:

“The film, which is thrown onto the rear surface of the wall separating these spaces, presents images of the same sinkholes rendered in graphite and arranged in a linear sequence. Each drawing emerges in steps through a process of single-frame animation, then holds momentarily as an image before giving way to the next. The runtime of the film is just over 14 minutes, but the print is joined end to end, with no title card to designate a beginning or conclusion. One after another, a hundred sinkholes cycle in an unbroken loop, surfacing relentlessly but accumulating nothing, emerging to collapse, emerging in collapsing. Through circularity, the film’s time is made to fold, returning by extending forward, progressing to return. Each new image becomes an echo and the gallery itself a sort of eddy that echoes the swirl of celluloid atop the projector. Between the viewing space and the images onscreen, a resonance arises: time as a blot suspended in the white cube.”[1]

This work was exhibited at Simon Preston Gallery, New York, in 2015 and acquired by the Museum of Modern Art that year.

[1] Joshua Guilford, “One Hundred and One Sinkholes: Notes on the Film Loop,”  http://www.flowjournal.org/2016/09/one-hundred-and-one-sinkholes/ (September 19 2016)

20 drawings (10 diptychs), colored pencil on paper, each drawing 24.5"x8.5," 2009
These drawings represent variations of the rhythms of the musical composition Dust of Snow from 1942 by Elliott Carter (with text by Robert Frost). The colored squares are representations of variations created by using the Cuisenaire Rods, a music and math teaching tool developed in the 1920s by Belgian schoolteacher Georges Cuisenaire.
Addendum
Ten multilayered drawings, watercolor on paper overlaid with watercolor on vellum, A4, 2007
This series of drawings utilizes images from music by J.S. Bach and information related to the trial of the Somali immigrant Nuradin Abdi, whose case was described in my previous film, Possible Models (2004). Abdi was arrested in 2003 and accused of planning to blow up a shopping mall in Columbus Ohio (my home state). The case finally went to trial on August 6, 2007. Abdi made a deal with the U.S. Government to plead guilty to one charge. He will be given 10 years in prison and then most likely be deported to Somalia.

The drawings combine images of technology, restricted trees, music by Bach and keyboard tunings, along with maps of Somalia and Ohio. Each drawing is two or three layers, base layer is watercolor on archival paper, with one or two drawings of watercolor on vellum layered on top.

Six drawings, colored pencil on newsprint, 30”x50”, 2007

Film: 16mm, b/w, silent, 2:25, 2007

The drawings are made in the process of animating the short, hand-drawn animated film, Box Office (2007). The film begins with a quote by current U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan C. Crocker. In July, 2007, the New York Times quoted Crocker as comparing the current war in Iraq to a three or five-reel movie, depending on where one is living. In contrast to this quote, a list of the top-ten grossing films at the U.S. box office from the same day presents itself onscreen, along with other animated panels of related drawings.

19 drawings, each drawing, graphite on paper, 22" x 30" 
Film: 16mm, b/w, silent, 5:40, 2007

160 drawings, ink on vellum, A4, arranged in grid, 2007

Four drawings a day. Blue, red, yellow, green.  Each drawing contains 500 small squares on an A4 sheet of vellum. Each one is a process and accumulates to a grid representing the passage of time. I draw until the small brush has run completely out of color.  And then repeat.

Four color photographs, ed. 20, 9"x12", 2006

Six drawings for the film "Notes."
Each drawing, graphite on paper, 36"x 36," 2006

12 drawings, 9"x12," ink and graphite on paper, 2005-06

19 drawings, each 30”x 55,” graphite on paper, 2005

Fifteen drawings, ink and colored pencil on paper, 9"x12", 2005-06

a collaborative drawing project | 2003-2005
80 works on paper, audio CD, boom box, dimensions variable

Translation is comprised of a series of audio recordings I made while traveling in the summer of 2003, a series of collected drawings, and a number of short texts. Instead of taking a camera with my on my travels in Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, and Estonia, I made audio recordings wherever I wanted to take a picture, gathering everyday sounds on location.  After returning to the U.S., I waited 3 months and then tried to write a description of each place I had been, based on my memory of the site. I then invited friends and colleagues to make drawings based on my descriptions. The drawings reflect a double translation, from sound to writing to others’ interpretations of my audio-text memories. The collected drawings are exhibited with handouts of the written texts and a boom box playing the audio tracks on auto-repeat. 
This piece was first shown at the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, Kansas, as part of the exhibition Possible models: New Work by Jenny Perlin (10 November-23 December, 2005.)
DRAWINGS BY: Susan Agliata, Jesse Ash, Claire Barliant, Laurie Bazzicalupo, Judy Belle, Michael Blum, Bibi Calderaro, Yane Calovski, Luis Camnitzer, Andrea Charles, Clint Cleveland, Martha Colburn, Emily Cronbach, Leeza Doreian, Anna Faroqhi, Cecilia Galiena, Grady Gerbracht, Jaime Gili, Jackie Goss, Karsten Grumstrupp, Kira Lynn Harris, Emily Jacir, Susan Jahoda, Jumi Kim, H. Lan Thao Lam, Sarah Jane Lapp, Lana Lin, Pia Lindman, Mary Lum, Erin Mallay, Lou Mallozzi, Amy Marinelli, Vanessa Mayoraz, Erin McMonagle, Stephen Metts, Lize Mogel, Joshua Mosley, Giancarlo Norese, Santa Oborenko, Mary Osmundsen, Young Park, Bik van der Pol, Andrea Ray, Steve Roden, Luis Romero, Stephanie Rothenberg, Lynne Sachs, Alice Shikina, Anton Sinkewicz, Elise Tak, Sergio Torres, Rachel Urkowitz, Claudia Viera, Stephen Vitiello & Georgia Leopold Vitiello, Enrico Wey ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Special thanks to Grady Gerbracht and his Conceptual Drawing class at SUNY Stonybrook, Susan Agliata, Luis Camnitzer, and all participants.

Graphite on paper, each approximately 30”x55,” 2004

26 ink drawings on vellum, installed as a grid, 2004 - present

Restricted is a series of drawings based on photographs taken during travels from Belgrade to Brooklyn. Starting with the film Schumann (2002), Perlin has continued her interest in the ways trees are restricted, trained, and confined to protect and grow them “properly.” Restricted is an ongoing series of drawings in ink on vellum.  Twenty-six of these drawings were exhibited at the solo exhibition Sight Reading (2005) at Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam.

Ink and graphite on paper, 2002-2003

Six drawings, graphite on paper, 2002

Gouache on transparent paper, 2002

Gouache on transparent paper, 2002

Gouache on paper, 2002

Graphite on transparent paper, 1998-2000

Series of 50 9”x12” drawings on vellum, adapted from the United Nations Mission in Kosovo statistics and memos on civilian deaths during the war.

Addendum

Ten drawings, watercolor on paper overlaid with watercolor on vellum, A4, 2007

This series of drawings utilizes images from music by J.S. Bach and information related to the trial of the Somali immigrant Nuradin Abdi, whose case was described in my previous film, Possible Models (2004). Abdi was arrested in 2003 and accused of planning to blow up a shopping mall in Columbus Ohio. The case finally went to trial on August 6, 2007. Abdi made a deal with the U.S. government to plead guilty to one charge. He was most likely be given 10 years in prison and then deported to Somalia. nb: As of this writing (July 2020), Abdi was been deported to Somalia after two years in prison in the United States.

The drawings combine images of cell phones and televisions, trained trees, music by Bach and keyboard tunings, as well as maps of Somalia and Ohio. Each drawing is two or three layers, watercolor on paper with one or two drawings of watercolor on vellum layered on top.