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RACHEL PERRY THE ISABELLA STEWART GARDNER MUSEUM'S ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE CREATES MASTERFUL ART FROM WHAT THE REST OF US THROW AWAY. BY JARED BOWEN WHEN HER SON WAS BORN prematurely and nearly died, it was one of the most harrowing times of artist Rachel Perry's life. She became the full-time caregiver of a child tethered to oxygen tubes and a heart monitor. The experience left her a devout supporter of the Boston Children's Hospital NICU (childrens hospital.org). "It's no exaggeration to say they saved my son's life," she says. "The nurses and doctors were devoted, not only to the patient and his care, but to caring for the parents, too." The experience also marked another turning point: Several years later, with her son well and attending school, Perry herself enrolled in art school. There, she found a way to control the chaos that had become her life the best way she knew how— through art. She created a large-scale drawing by meticulously transcribing her son's 645-page medical chart onto 23 gridded sheets. Then she took his 37-page medical bill and rendered it in eye-popping color—assigning each letter and number its own hue. A conceptual artist was born. Today, Perry's son is a healthy college athlete and she is an artist with works in numerous museum collections. She's been the subject of a solo show at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, and Vogue magazine commissioned her to create a four-page pictorial essay in 2011. "Ideas just come, that's the beauty and the difficulty," says Perry. Often they arise out of the rawest parts of life, like human interaction. "Language is the underpinning of my work," she explains. "Its impotence and inability to really describe what we humans are trying to describe is an ongoing fascination." She provocatively explores that notion in a 36-foot-tall piece now adorning the façade of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. It's a photograph in which the artist has painstakingly sculpted a single roll of tin foil to pose the question, "What do you really want?" Perry took the query from the subject line of a spam email she once received—part of a collection she's accrued over the years. "Taken out of context, these become existential questions," she says. Perry has long been on the radar of Pieranna Cavalchini, curator of contemporary art at the Gardner, which selected her to be an artist-in- residence in 2014. "Rachel is working with the everyday and making it monumental, and making us think in a very simple way," Cavalchini says. "I think it's brilliant." Perry's latest work is a study in opposites. In her Chiral Lines series, she's drawn colorful lines using her right and then left hand to create non-superimposable mirror images. "They grow and become these very wavering, trembling, almost seismic lines," she says. And they're made using pens and markers she's had for years— retrieved from her car, studio, and even under her sofa. Whether memories or markers, Perry fuses the detritus of her life with her art—making breathtaking self-por- traits in disguise. "Rachel Perry: What Do You Really Want?" runs through June at the Gardner Museum, New Wing Façade, 25 Evans Way, 617-566-1401; gardnermuseum.org. Perry's work will also be featured at "First Light: A Decade of Collecting at the ICA," which runs August 17, 2016, through January 16, 2017, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, 25 Harbor Shore Dr., 617-478-3100; icaboston.org. rachelperrystudio.com 80 BOSTONCOMMON-MAGAZINE.COM BOSTON