Aphotic Sums by artist Jovencio de la Paz
The Alice would like to welcome you to the opening of the exhibition Aphotic
Sums by artist Jovencio de la Paz, Saturday the 18th of March, 5-7pm.
“Using traditional colonial American textile processes including overshot
weaving and hand rug-punching, the soft works in this exhibition exist
between a variety of external pressures. As commodity, as Americana, as
witness to a dark, Colonial past embedded and encoded in fabric both physical
and social, these lengths of cloth are formal explorations and reverse
stratigraphy, patterns and processes displaced in time and history. The
structures at the core of these textiles, the binary “over and under” of
woven fabric, evoke other assumed binaries: blackness and whiteness, high and
low culture, the public and the domestic, the political and the poetic. In
the absence of chroma, these works deal in stark contrasts, and situate
themselves in the turbulent place where the soft world of cloth confronts the
hard edge of the political.”
Jovencio de la Paz is an artist, writer, and educator. His work explores the
intersection of textile processes such as weaving, dye, and surface design as
they relate to broader concerns of ancient technology, language,
codification, community, and identity. Interested in the ways transient or
ephemeral experiences are embodied in material, de la Paz looks to how
knowledge, stories, and memories are transmitted through society in space and
time, whether semiotically by language or haptically by made things. He is
currently Assistant Professor and Curricular Head of Fibers at the University
of Oregon.
Jovencio de la Paz received a Masters of Fine Art from the Cranbrook Academy
of Art (2012) and a Bachelors of Fine Art in Fiber and Material Studies from
the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2008). He has exhibited his work
both nationally and internationally, most recently at ThreeWalls, Chicago,
IL; The Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR; Carl & Sloan Contemporary
Art, Portland, OR; 4th Ward Projects, Chicago, IL; SPACE Gallery, Portland,
ME; The Sculpture Center, Cleveland, OH; SPACE Gallery, Portland, ME; SOIL
Gallery, Seattle, WA; Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center, Chicago; The
Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; MessHall, Chicago; Uri Gallery, Seoul, South
Korea. among others. He regularly teaches at schools of art, craft, and
design throughout the country, including the Ox Bow School of Art in
Saugatuck, Michigan, the Haystack Mountain School of Craft in Deer Isle,
Maine, and the Arrowmont School of Craft in Tennessee. He is also a
co-founder of the collaborative group Craft Mystery Cult, established in
2010.