Artist Sondra Perry uses video, performance, and digital manipulations to explore notions of identity, representation, and Blackness, both from an intimately personal perspective and a historical lens. Expanded to monumental proportions across the billboards of Times Square, Flesh Wall (2016-2020) is an animation of a super-modulated, highly processed image of the artist’s skin — so magnified that it takes on a nearly unrecognizable form. Through this process, “the flesh loses all kind of realistic render, but you gain some kind of understanding of what creature-ness is or what identity means outside the label of human,” says Perry.

Multiplied on over 70 digital displays across the district every midnight in February, casting a glow over the plazas below, Flesh Wall carves out a bodily presence in the built urban landscape — an immersive, pulsing connective tissue within the digital and physical architecture.

Perry uses a variety of computer-based media in her practice, including tools like blue screens, avatars, open-source software, and found footage from YouTube. In Flesh Wall, she employs Blender Software’s ‘Ocean’ modifier tool — an open-source graphics program normally used to create 3-D renderings of oceans. By placing her own flesh within the context of the ocean, Perry makes a statement on the Black diasporic experience: “In the context of the transatlantic slave trade, the ocean is a literal modifier to culture, bodies, movement,” says the artist.  

This Midnight Moment marks Perry's return to Times Square and the program. In the emergent years of her career as a globally-exhibited artist, Perry worked for Times Square Arts where she supported the Midnight Moment program. With this Midnight Moment, she returns to Times Square Arts, this time as a featured artist.