Something truly remarkable happens when you first see a photograph taken by Olivia Perillo. It could be faded red boxing gloves in a Texas bar, or even an  graveyard with fresh flowers near the Mexican border, there is always the palpable sense of the artist’s empathy. There is genuine warmth to her work that can’t be shaken after you’ve seen it. But even further, there is this strange feeling of peace that rushes over you. Like a sunset at the end of a long day, Perillo’s work wraps up the voices and ghosts of the past and crystalizes them into a single moment of natural beauty. “I hope that my photographs of the natural world serve as portal of tranquility,” she says, “and a space held for personal reflection, gratitude for and healing with the land and the self, as they do for me when I make them.” In pursuit of this, the 30-year-old South Louisiana artist’s work has taken her far and wide, from swamps to deserts, but she has never lost her keen ability to find beauty and contemplation in the most unexpected of places.

A central theme of Perillo’s artwork is an excavation of ancestral stories tied to physical spaces and people. Perillo believes that this fascination stems from an awareness of her own personal history passing through and interacting with these people and spaces. “I became inspired by the changing landscape between South Louisiana and Far West Texas, witnessing similarities and overlaps between the cultures that bounced back and forth between my life experience.” Perillo’s hopes to raise the audience’s awareness of their own experiences interacting with the cultural ancestry displayed in her work.

This cross section between shifting geographies and changes of the soul seems to have begun even before she was born, having a meteorologist father and social worker mother. But, for Perillo, this intersecting identity goes deeper and should, as art, be expressed outwards to nature and people. What motivates Perillo is the hope that her art can turn a caring eye upon its audience, and act as a form of healing. This, in turn, should raise her audience’s awareness of their own place within a lineage and a landscape. “Healing is a practice of self-awareness,” she says, “so by learning and revisiting our ancestors’ lives in relation to time and place, we learn more about the patterns of our grandparents, parents and ultimately ourselves.” It is important for Perillo that her audience realizes that when they are observing nature, they aren’t alone. They are observed by hundreds, maybe even thousands of past events, ancestors and stories. She believes that if a person acknowledges and listens to these voices, it can have a profound effect on their spiritual growth.

This interaction between physical locales and psychology is so important to Perillo precisely because of its quite real influence on an individual, and the crucial role an individual can play towards structural change. “I believe this happens on an individual level first and moves through our interpersonal relationships with our neighbors and immediate communities as collective care,” Perillo says. “Capturing their perspectives holds the mirror to themselves and for the audience, reflecting back what they need to receive the most, and maybe something new. Creative expression itself allows for radical healing to happen to anyone who creates or resonates with it.”

It is perhaps this artistic effleurage that is responsible for the calming effect Perillo’s photographs can have on her audience. It is because it is so easy to tell that they were made with love, that the hand that made them acted without itself in mind, and that the intention of these works was the warm care of its audience. In the same way that a social structure can inflict trauma and hate from the top-down, it is Perillo’s opinion that art can do the same with healing and love, but in the opposite direction. “Trauma affects our body on a cellular level, so it gets passed down through lineages especially when it isn’t worked through”, she says. This is a singular fascination in the artist’s work, and one she hopes can enable an “ancestral healing between South Louisiana and the American Southwest.” This will in turn lead to a liberation from a modern sense of life and death, and Perillo views the subjects of her work to be an extension of this notion.

It is easy to imagine that this is why the Chicana-Italian artist focuses so heavily on silent, empty spaces in nature to express this point. In every new locale, from the red and amber chasms of the Grand Canyon, to the somnolent green atmosphere of the Louisiana swampland, Perillo always lays a heavy emphasis on an acceptance of change. If nature can accept seismic changes with such a stoic face then perhaps so can we. “I receive a lot of inspiration from nature,” she says, “as it is always changing and is cyclical, much like our human experience with birth, growth and inevitable death.”

In conclusion, there is an enviable serenity to Olivia Perillo, if one is lucky enough to meet her. She is often solitary with a camera in hand and smiling under the Lake Martin trees, but she seems to be truly at peace with the roar of nature. It is evident that this serenity comes directly from her mission statement, from her reason for making art in the first place. As she explained, she aimed to heal in every new work of art that she made. Then, her joy made sense. She had a truly noble pursuit as she tried to make art not just for herself, but for the honest benefit of others. Her role, in all practicality, has become something like a medicinal anthropologist. She has viewed the past as an antidote to the questions of the present and has subsequently made her art both a cultural study and a tool of hospitality. Her work represents a perspective, in three equal parts, of her own personal history, the austere and crooked lines of the earth, and finally, the remedial voices of the past that guide us from the dirt. The work of Olivia Perillo, whether it be in documentary filmmaking, or photography, or visual art, expresses a deep appreciation of the shifting landscape of the human soul, and an even finer eye for the landscapes people roam in search of themselves.