Out of Sight - An Exhibition of Artist Books by Eliana Pérez.

Opens December 20th, 4:00-8:00 pm at El Barrio’s ArtSpace PS109, 215 East 99th St, NYC, 10029.

Continues December 21-29, 5:00-8:00 pm (excluding 12/25 & 12/26)

Please join Eliana Pérez in NYC on December 20th as she presents 3 artist books.  Each book addresses the intractable challenges of poverty, violence and environmental degradation within her home country of Colombia, as precipitated by the perverse incentives and depredation of the global market economy.  This includes a first look at her newest book Only Good for Crying, detailing the barbaric tactics of ESMAD, an armored police force deployed against Colombian citizens in non-violent protests.  Her book COCA exposes the ecological destruction and human suffering distilled within the so-called “war on drugs”.  Falso+ (Falso Positivo) responds to the Colombian army’s abduction and murder of thousands of Colombian citizens in an attempt to bolster statistics and perpetuate their decades-long war against guerilla groups, skimming off the financial benefits that accompany it. This project is made possible in part with funds from Creative Engagement and UMEZ Arts Engagement, a regrant program administered by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Center and supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Eliana on Instagram: @elianaperezstudio

Eliana’s webpage: www.elianaperez.com

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Only Good for Crying, 2025

Art & Design: Eliana Pérez

22” x 11” x 1¾”  Hand bound, laser-engraved acrylic panels, 9 pages.

Only Good for Crying is the third book in Eliana’s series exploring the intractable challenges facing Colombia, her native country.  It records the brutal tactics used by the militarized Colombian police forces in suppressing peaceful citizen protests.  In the spring of 2021, the ESMAD (Mobile Anti-Distrubance Squad) used “less-lethal” weapons to purposefully inflict debilitating eye injuries on more than one hundred peaceful protestors, often resulting in the complete loss of sight in their injured eyes.  The title, Only Good for Crying, is taken from a doctor’s frank assessment of one victim’s eye.  Her gruesome injury was the result of a shotgun blast of “less-lethal” plastic birdshot.

The clear acrylic pages are laser-engraved with drawings and text.  The transparency invites the viewer to look deep into the book, with the ability to see multiple pages and layers at the same time.  On one side of the book, a dimensional drawing comprises nine layers, each set at a different depth, simultaneously evoking elements ranging in scale from microscopic (nerves and capillaries) to cosmic (galaxies and the universe itself).  On the other side of the book, a volumetric cloud of unreadable text collapses in on itself, suggesting the confusion and difficulty with which the victims navigate the world after their injuries, now challenged with previously simple tasks like reading text.  When the page is turned, the text becomes readable, at the same time peeling a layer away from the volumetric drawing.  The more pages that are turned, the more elements disappear, stripping away complexity, nuance, and detail, in the same way that the victims are robbed of their ability to fully experience the visual world.

Only Good for Crying text:

“In many places, the police are a civilian force, ostensibly trained to protect the public.  The cops in Colombia are different.  They’re under the command of the military, stocked with men trained for combat against narcotraffickers and well-armed criminal groups.  The ESMAD (Escuadrón Móvil Antidisturbios / Mobile Anti-disturbance Squad) is the Colombian police version of a SWAT team, with armored suits and “less-lethal” weapons to use against their fellow citizens.

The ESMAD’s mission is not the stated one of settling unrest and bringing order.  The true objective of the ESMAD is to engender fear of their organization in the mind of the public and thoroughly disincentivize participation in civil disobedience or protest.  That was true in the spring of 2021 when they were sent to suppress protests in cities around Colombia.  Within four weeks there would be dozens of civilians dead, hundreds missing and thousands of reports of police abuse.

As injury and abuse reports ballooned, an unusually high incidence of eye trauma became evident.  The ESMAD were deliberately targeting the heads, faces and eyes of civilians at close range with their “non-lethal” weapons: shotguns firing metal and plastic birdshot, and tear-gas grenade launchers.  The ESMAD understood that attacking a delicate, unprotected organ was the best way to injure their assigned enemies.  During the month of May, over 100 protestors suffered grave eye injuries, leaving the victims permanently disfigured, disabled and blinded.

The mostly young victims face a lifetime of struggles ahead of them; every task is more difficult with limited vision.  But the consequences of state-directed violence extend far beyond the initial physical harm.  

The government and police propaganda is surprisingly effective at branding protestors as criminals, and this stigma follows them as they seek medical treatment and legal recourse, often resulting in denials for treatment or substandard care and representation.  When victims take legal action against abusive police, they and their families often receive threatening calls, messages, and visits; some victims who have the resources have fled the country out of concern for their safety.

Victims suffer lasting psychological trauma.  Fear of authority and a reluctance to contact police or government agencies for help is common.  They experience on-going issues with self-esteem including insecurity about their disfigured appearance, and a loss of confidence in their abilities to perform competently at work or school.

The economic damage to the victims and society is also very real.  These injuries will require a lifetime of costly treatment and care, and the earning potential of the injured is significantly curtailed. 

Deliberately targeting the eyes of protestors by authoritarian police forces is not unique to Colombia, and has precedents in uprisings elsewhere in recent history.”

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COCA, 2022

Art & Design: Eliana Pérez

The first, unique COCA book is in the collection of The Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Bainbridge Island, WA. The subsequent editioned version has been acquired by: Stanford University, Stanford, CA; Princeton University, Princeton, NJ; Smith College, Northampton, MA; Tufts University, Medford, MA; University of Delaware, Newark, DE; Private Collection of Davis & Louise Reimer.

Eliana Pérez’s book, COCA, is the second in her series about her home country, Colombia. It continues her evocative exploration at the bloody intersection of poverty, violence, and a global market economy.  Following the peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC guerilla group in 2016, Eliana turned her efforts toward documenting and addressing the many challenges facing her homeland, starting with the Falsos Positivos scandal (Falso +, 2019, in the collection of Yale University) and now examining the cocaine trade and its effects on Colombia’s environment and communities.

COCA text:

“Greedy plunder of Earth’s most valuable commodities brings suffering, death and extinction to the world’s most vulnerable inhabitants. Cocaine production in the wilds of Colombia is no exception, wiping out the people, plants and animals living there.

From above, the Colombian Amazon resembles the coat of a mangy dog: bald spots fester where parasitic coca farms multiply. After a short while, each patch is abandoned and the producers move on to flay another hectare of this dwindling natural system. The harvested coca leaves require chemical processing to become cocaine, and the many serpentine freshwater rivers are convenient sewers for the poison waste. Riverbanks rot with cankerous processing labs, discharging toxins into our planet's mightiest waterways.

The War On Drugs is a war on Colombian peasants. The farmers, community leaders and Indigenous residents that dare resist cultivation, trafficking, or eviction from their land are massacred. The state’s solution: a carcinogenic rain of herbicide withering leaves and corrupting cells. Like the coca plant dropping its blood-red fruit, the violence reseeds itself, ensuring successive iterations of victimization and destruction.”

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Falso+ (“False Positive”), 2019

Art & Design: Eliana Pérez

The original Falso+ is in the collection of Yale University, New Haven, CT.

22” x 6.5”  Unique accordion book with hard covers, 15 pages. The accordion binding allows the pages to be drawn out onto a flat surface for display, measuring up to 25’ 8”.

In relief on the cover, a moth hides under camouflage, a dreaded omen cloaked in militarism.  In Colombian folklore, the appearance of a moth in one’s house is a harbinger of a death in the family. Disks of silver leaf pepper the text, reminding us of the perverse monetary incentives soldiers received for each murder.

The horizontal linear format of the drawings mimics the visual reporting of these events in the media: corpses of the “false positives” dumped side by side into mass graves ... processions of the young victims’ mothers, dressed in white and demanding justice ... line-ups of soldiers and officers fabricating victories ... “confiscated” weapons laid side by side, displayed for news cameras …the parade of ants found winding along every surface in the south american jungle … curtains of trees lining the highways where victims were ferried from their homes to their slaughter … an array of empty chairs awaiting occupants that will never return.

Falso+ Text:

“Los Falsos Positivos (The False Positives) is a name given to a group of over 10,000 Colombian civilians murdered by the Colombian army between 2002-2010.  In an attempt to generate statistics supporting the government’s war against rebel groups and justify continuing aid and military packages from the US government, poverty-stricken young men and teenage boys were lured with the promise of jobs into remote areas and murdered by Colombian army soldiers.  Their dead bodies were propped with guns, camouflage uniforms and boots, and logged as rebel fighters killed while engaging with the Colombian army.  After documenting these “rebel combatants”, soldiers dumped their bodies into mass graves.  The hunting of these innocent civilians, carried out by rank and file members of the army, were ordered and incentivized by superiors; the killers were rewarded with promotions, money and other perks.  This atrocity has been traced to the highest levels of the Colombian military and government.  Investigations are underway but progressing slowly.  The term Falsos Positivos is rightfully rejected by human rights advocates as it implies an honest mistake; these deaths were cold-blooded murders, committed for personal and political gain.”

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Eliana Pérez - Curriculum Vitae

Eliana Pérez was born in Colombia.  She studied Fine Arts and Printmaking at the Universidad Nacional in Colombia and Bookmaking at Cooper Union in New York City.  Eliana is an associate artist of Booklyn Inc., a non-profit whose mission is to promote artists’ books as art and research material, documenting, exhibiting, and distributing artwork in the furtherance of environmental and social justice.

Her work can be found in the libraries of:

United States Library of Congress, Washington, DC

Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA

Yale University Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library, New Haven, CT

Princeton University, Princeton, NJ

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Smith College, Northampton, MA

University of Delaware, Newark, DE

Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Bainbridge Island, WA

Anthenaeum Music and Arts Library, La Jolla, CA

Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY

Long Island University, Brooklyn, NY

Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA

University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

Chapman University, Orange, CA

University of California, Irvine, CA

University of California, Berkeley, CA

University of California, Santa Barbara, CA

Sächsische Landesbibliothek- Staats-und Universitätsbibliothek,  Dresden, Germany

Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, Leipzig, Germany

Anderson Special Collections Library, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN

Tufts University, Medford, MA.

St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN

DePaul University, Chicago, IL

Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT

Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA

University of Connecticut, Mansfield, CT

SCAD, Savannah, GA

Lafayette College, Easton PA

Santa Fe University of Art & Design, Santa Fe, NM

Scripps College, Claremont, CA

Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA

Temple University, Philadelphia, PA

University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL

University of Wisconsin, Madison, WS

Private Collection of Davis & Louise Reimer