la ü en la i

Michael Velliquette

Exposición: Mar 18 – May 9, 2004


El proyecto de Michael Velliquette en ArtPace es una explosión de color y material. Con la ü en la i ha creado una atmósfera física intensa que rebosa de repetidos motivos visuales que encantan a los ojos mientras avanza en su larga investigación del Yo y el cosmos.

Velliquette ha hecho un espacio dentro de un espacio, construyendo una enorme caja de cartón dentro de lo que de otro modo sería una galería blanca de tres paredes. Como el armario en El león, la bruja y el armario de CS Lewis, una entrada al espacio sirve como umbral más allá del cual se encuentra otra realidad.

El espectador descubre la tierra caminando por un camino de lonas de plástico que cubren el piso. El camino conduce a través de un pequeño puente, hacia una cueva y hacia una almohada gigante con forma de mano que yace en el suelo. A lo largo del camino pasan ondas sinusoidales de color rosa neón y amarillo, arcoíris soleados de cinta de colores, cascadas acuosas de plástico azul y perfiles anónimos de doble cara recortados en papel con estampado de galaxias.

Para agravar el sentido de una persona que explora el pasado, el presente, el futuro y el mundo más allá, está la abrumadora presencia de dedos extendidos y escrutadores. De cada esquina cuelga una mano de cartón de dos metros marcada por un móvil planetario. Palmas gigantes salen de las paredes y un par de ojos inquisitivos exploran el espacio en busca de respuestas.

La multitud de elementos en la ü en la i fomenta una aguda conciencia del lugar de uno en el universo. Es un desorden misteriosamente ordenado, una potente metáfora de los ritmos de la vida en este planeta y quizás de lo que hay más allá.

Artista

Michael Velliquette

San Antonio, Texas, USA

Michael Velliquette has used drawing, sculpture, and video to delve into his psyche and daily life. Over the past decade he has recorded himself and his surroundings, and composed environments that reflect his personal journey. Using readily available materials classically associated with craft—paper, plastic, felt-tip markers, tape—he creates all-encompassing, fictional worlds that explore the relationship between the self and the universe at large.
With each project Velliquette crafts a space-specific piece that encourages thoughts about humans and the world around us. To hasten the contemplation of metaphysics he employs a wealth of visual stimulants reminiscent of 1960s psychedelia and more recent rave culture. In his installation The Depth of the Drop (2003), a darkened room was crisscrossed by paper streamers printed with images of the galaxy. Projected on one wall was a video of a storm, while looped on a monitor was footage of a starry-eyed mummy singing sad soul songs. The work sparked thoughts about the afterlife and where we go from here. Like his other work, the piece used dramatic means to distill attention onto the intersection of science, cosmology, philosophy, and religion.
Michael Velliquette was born in 1971 in Sandusky, OH and has lived in San Antonio, TX since receiving his MFA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2000. Recent solo exhibitions include The Suburban, Chicago, IL (2004) as well as Three Walls (2003), Blue Star Contemporary Art Center (2003) and Cactus Bra Space (2003) in San Antonio, TX. Velliquette’s work has been shown in group exhibitions at Deitch Projects, New York, NY (2003); the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX (2002); and the Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto, Canada (1999).

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Curador

Lawrence Rinder

New York, New York, USA

Lawrence Rinder is the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and was Chief Curator of the 2002 Whitney Biennial which was not restricted by a single theme, and aimed to expose multiple, sometimes conflicting currents, as well as extraordinary works that fall outside of any conventional aesthetic definition. Another recent exhibition, BitStreams (2001), co-curated with Debra Singer, presented projects that harness digital media to achieve new dimensions of artistic expression through the transformation of images, space, data, and sound.
Prior to joining the Whitney in 2000 Rinder was founding director of the California College of Arts and Crafts Institute; Curator for Twentieth-Century Art at the University Art Museum and the Pacific Film Archive, UC Berkeley, and Curator of the Matrix program, UC Berkeley.
In addition to his many exhibition catalogues, Rinder’s writings have been included in books such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, (University of California Press, 2001), and Beyond Conceptualism: The Sixties Experiment (ICI, New York, 2000).  His art criticism has been published in numerous national and international periodicals including Shift, Flash Art, and Artforum.

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