Ronny Queveo's one-person exhibition, every measure of zero, at Upfor Gallery, Portland, OR.
The institution's press release follows:
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.