BRIGHT colors pop against the white walls at Renaissance Fine Art, a gallery in Harlem. M. Tony Peralta’s “Reconnected” exhibition is on display, and the Caribbean seems to wash through the space.

The bright hues come from photos screen-printed onto wood panels and canvases. Mr. Peralta took them during a visit to the Dominican Republic in 2011 in an effort to connect to his roots. Until his last trip, Mr. Peralta, 38, who was born in Washington Heights, was better known for art that observed — sometimes caustically — life in New York for a Dominican-American with immigrant parents. This show is about accepting the good and the bad of the Dominican Republic, but still loving it.

In the capital, Santo Domingo, as well as in areas of rural poverty, he captured the image for his work “El Pollero,” which shows a preteenage butcher chopping up chickens while wearing a navy blue cap with a dollar sign on it. Visiting his uncle Marcelo, Mr. Peralta snapped the photos in “Los Chamaquitos,” featuring a band of noisy neighborhood kids, like those in the film “The Goonies,” who hang out on the curb in front of the colmado, a grocery that sells everything from batteries and beers to beans by the peso.

Mr. Peralta, who studied media arts at Long Island University in Brooklyn, described himself as “a graphic designer first.” He recalls that when he was growing up, his half-brother, Robert Ramirez, went to Keith Haring’s Pop Shop in SoHo and bought an inflatable “radiant baby.”