Evan Perkins is a Boston-based artist and graduated with departmental honors from Massachusetts College of Art and Design’s BFA Photography program in 2019. His photographs delve into acute explorations of the relationships between man-made structures and the altered natural world. Perkins is also the Assistant Director at Gallery Kayafas, located in the SOWA Arts District of Boston.
About ‘Grab Your Bibles, There’s a Storm Comin‘ – words by Evan Perkins:
I was raised in a small, religious community. All aspects of my education and community were predicted upon these beliefs. Social status was informed by legalism, piety was the currency of choice. Questioning authority was discouraged and blind faith was the sole response to each and every situation.
Only years after moving away from this community did I realize how disconnected my upbringing was. Under further scrutiny, the foundations of what I was taught weren’t the strongholds I was promised. Blind dogma and fundamentalism were insufficient means to experience other individuals and the world around me. Issues and conflicts were no longer the polarizing duality of this or that but rather a complex in-between that had never been encouraged to explore. The veneer of piety and undeniable truth began to peel away, revealing people equally as unsure and broken as the rest of those around me.
With social and political tensions heightening in the last four years, (and escalating for decades prior), I began to view this upbringing as a microcosm of the white, religious, American experience that is too commonly viewed as the assumed American perspective, anything else a deviation. Our country divides itself around fabricated facades, forgetting that we all still share basic human fears and desires. People and issues are reduced to their most oversimplified state, used to reinforce preexisting divisions that have been constructed throughout our country’s history.
The images in Grab Your Bibles, There’s a Storm Comin’, create a fictitious community, full of contradiction and paradox; used to invite a dissection of the white, religious, Americans that our systems of influence have continually granted the most power. It is an exploration of the ways in which groups conform to a prescribed set of moral beliefs and rituals in search for certainty in a world where the comforts of conviction seem forever out of reach.
