PROJECT STATEMENT
Perform La Femme is a collaborative self-portrait project created and performed by Angilee Wilkerson and Jana C. Perez (1966–2021). Perez’s unexpected death brought the collaboration to an abrupt end, revealing an existential enquiry within the series that emerged in retrospect.
Perform La Femme began with Wilkerson and Perez alternating roles behind and in front of the camera, but found its fullest expression when both artists entered the frame. Their relationship became integral to the composition, transforming the exchange between photographer and subject into a shared performance in which the collaboration itself was given form.
Perform La Femme draws from the language of Florentine Renaissance painting, religious imagery, and allegorical traditions, invoking a visual history in which women have been rendered as symbols, such as the Madonna, the Maiden, and the Seductress. Wilkerson and Perez enter this lineage on their own terms, inhabiting, disrupting, and reshaping these inherited representations of femininity.
Rooted in personal histories and the intimacy of their relationship, the artists construct a stage where shifting personas recast archetypes and personal narratives emerge, revealing without fully disclosing. In the collaborative act, female camaraderie becomes both subject and method. As each other’s muse and teacher, they turn the camera upon themselves, asserting the authority of their own experiences and embodied knowledge.
Against a pervasive ideal of youth, often treated as inseparable from beauty, Perform La Femme presents the mature body as a complex and layered expression of womanhood, where age expands rather than narrows the possibilities of becoming. Across these photographic tableaux, liminal environments, atmospheric light, and recurring color become metaphors for emotional and physical states. Gestures read as code; objects carry symbolic weight. Moving through a succession of enigmatic characters, meaning remains unsettled, suspended somewhere between recognition and the unknowable.
In retrospect, the images take on an uncanny resonance: gestures of distance now suggest dissolution—a gradual slipping beyond reach that seems to foreshadow a loss neither artist could have anticipated.
Yet the work speaks not only to loss, but to a persistent search for what lies just beyond the visible, as though the act of making the images might uncover something veiled—an intuitive recognition of passage, recurrence, and our place within a continuum larger than ourselves.
“A most compelling and visually stunning examination of female camaraderie, I just kept thinking what fun to self-art direct these scenarios. Allegorical tales always good to examine and deconstruct! ”