In House of Ghosts, Eliana Pérez bridges her traditional technique and media with digital intervention and suggests that below the illusory safety and comfort of our domestic lives lies stress and fear fed by the real violence and brutality of the world.

Architectural elements appear throughout the book as the narrator moves from room to room and house to house struggling with the unsettling realization that he no longer fits in the places he once felt most at home.
The concrete-gray cover, ostensibly to protect the book and its contents, is left raw and open around the edges, showing that even the most durable facades have vulnerabilities; all of our best defenses have limitations.

At first glance, the painted interiors are comfortable and even luxurious, but a closer look reveals an unsettling undercurrent of violence. Pérez, influenced by Asian miniatures, speckles the depicted rooms with tension between predator and prey: situations where death is imminent, or implicit in the macabre fetishization of slaughtered animal parts as decor.

With pin-prick drawings of clothes-moths textured into the book’s pages, Pérez layers in another level of predation. In her native country of Colombia, a moth in the house can be a harbinger of an imminent death in the family. Hiding on most spreads, these tiny moths threaten the fabrics that host even the most formidable of these beasts, demonstrating that size and ferocity do not correlate with destructive power. Insertion of the insects into the page with needled holes suggests the damage they are likely to inflict, maybe even to the natural fiber pages of the book itself. When extended for display, light passes through the pin-holes and the hidden insects are suddenly revealed from front or back.

Can be extended up to 28’ long for display. Archival giclée pigment print with pin-hole drawings on Canson 210 gsm 100% cotton rag.
Art and Design by Eliana Pérez. Poem by Marshall Weber.