Izze Perrella is a Victoria-based visual artist working across photography, metal and soft sculpture, generative digital visuals, and video installation. Currently completing her BFA in Visual Arts at the University of Victoria, she has developed a multidisciplinary practice grounded in material exploration, layering processes, and the reworking of both physical and digital forms. Throughout her undergraduate studies, she has cultivated a strong creative process that continues to evolve through experimentation with tactile materials, technological interfaces, and expanded approaches to image-making. Her work has been exhibited in group exhibitions at the Audain Gallery in Victoria, including All Together Now and Spillways.
At the core of my practice lies layering to sit at the centre, where I physically and conceptually work with material surfaces, digital visuals, emotional memory, and influences from the places I have lived. Having lived between two places being Alberta growing up and British Columbia in my adulthood, I often find myself holding both places with me not as fixed coordinates, but as layered impressions that blend into one another. My photographic and sculptural works take this idea literally as in my art practice images are cut, woven, and rebuilt so that two places, two times, and two versions of memory exist together instead of separately. A photograph becomes a site of accumulation rather than documentation, where fragments are allowed to coexist instead of narrowing into a single truth. In my process, I print, cut, weave, and layer archival family photographs so that images begin to blur into one another. My digital and video works continue this approach through time instead of material. Here, I create what I consider living artworks, or images that regenerate and rebuild themselves continuously. I’ve begun exploring how frames cycle and evolve in ways that feel calm at first, yet slightly uncanny in their persistence as if the work is breathing on its own. These pieces do not resolve into a final state but exist in constant return, inviting viewers to remain with them rather than glance and move on. In extended viewing the work feels familiar and unfamiliar at once, echoing how memory loops and reforms across a lifetime. Across mediums, layering remains the core of my practice as a way to hold place, past, and experience together without forcing them to become a single, unified story. My aim is for the work to feel alive, returning endlessly, like memory living in the body.
