All photos © Deborah Mesa-Pelly

“I’ve been working on location, setting images in overlooked and all too familiar spaces. There is a ritualistic aspect in the way I establish these photographs that traffic in both photography and sculpture to arrive at narrative. The activity of collecting and repurposing found objects transforms an inspirational poster into a backdrop for a neglected turtle’s tank while simultaneously expanding the shallow pictorial field with deep space illusion. Through restaging domestic interiors and questioning the photograph as document, perception is jarred and the knowable questioned.”

Deborah Mesa-Pelly has exhibited her work nationally and internationally. Her photographs are part of the public collections at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, Seattle Art Museum, The Orange County Museum in Los Angeles, The Neuberger Museum at Purchase College, The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and Centro de Photographia, Salamanca, Spain. She is a professor of photography at Purchase College. Born in 1968, she immigrated to the US from Havana, Cuba when she was 3 years old and currently resides in New York City with her husband artist Michael Wetzel and their daughter Alba Rose.

Above “Bed Cage” 2011

"Miley Cyrus" 2011

"Owl" 2010

"Sunset Tank" 2009

"Veneer (Plinth)" 2012

"Woodland" 2010