Every Measure of Zero
Ronny Quevedo
March 8 - April 10, 2019
First Thursday opening March 7 from 6-8 PM
Artist Q & A Wednesday, April 17 at 6 PM (please RSVP here)
Ronny Quevedo’s first solo exhibition with Upfor features new and recent work exploring the invisibility of marginal cultures and physical labor, as they relate to the artist’s personal history and our larger cultural moment. The exhibition title, Every Measure of Zero, is shared by a series of works on paper that relate to the artist’s interest in Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation. Quevedo’s series questions the concept of point of origin, suggesting it as a malleable, unfixed position.
Through a rigorous mark-making and embossing process, Quevedo generates a range of surfaces and colors. He derives patterns and marks from sporting fields, gymnasiums, indigenous land works, pre-Columbian textiles and constellations. Traditional and found materials, such as dress maker’s wax paper, pattern paper and spray paint, are combined with gold and silver leaf, metals redolent with meaning in the history of the Americas.
Quevedo addresses issues of marginalization and displacement by focusing on personal memories, social environments and shared histories of migration. Sources as diverse as his move from Ecuador to New York in childhood, his father’s biography as a soccer player, his mother’s profession as a seamstress, the geometric abstraction of Wari textiles, architecture of the Andes and the Nazca lines (a group of ancient geoglyphs in southern Peru) inform his material and visual choices. This results in geometric abstractions that come from the artist’s own questioning of “neutral” sites that ignore the contributions of colonized cultures.
Ronny Quevedo (b. 1981, Guayaquil, Ecuador) works in a variety of mediums including sculpture and drawing. Quevedo's work was included in the recent Whitney Museum’s exhibition Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art. His next solo exhibition, opens at Upfor in March. Previous solo exhibitions include no hay medio tiempo / there is no halftime, Queens Museum (2017); Home Field Advantage, Casita Maria Center for Arts & Education, Bronx, New York (2015); and Ulama, Ule, Olé, Carol Jazzar Gallery, Miami (2013). He is a recipient of a Queens Museum/Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists and A Blade of Grass Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art. He has participated in residencies at the Triangle Arts, Socrates Sculpture Park, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Kala Art Institute, the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Project Row Houses, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, and Smack Mellon. Quevedo received his MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2013 and BFA from The Cooper Union in 2003.
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