Soccer fields, garment papers and Andean objects get delineated as sites of inheritance, revalorization and cosmovisions in “Ronny Quevedo: a l l s t a r s” at the Krannert Art Museum in Champaign-Urbana. Already acquired by museums like the Whitney Museum of American Art and represented by the gallery Alexander Gray Associates, this is the first institutional solo show of Ecuadorian-born and New York-based artist Ronny Quevedo in the Midwest. For his premiere, Quevedo presents works from their recent past and a new installation piece made with objects from the reinstalled and reframed Krannert’s Andean art collection. Using wax, drywall, muslin, carbon paper and gold-silver leaves, Quevedo draws relationships between material agency, liminal mythologies and knowledge systems.
Quevedo’s works are expansive fields of abstractions made by stripped, traced, transferred and buffed materials. The works are genreless drawings resembling cartographies, constellations, dressmaking diagrams and sports playbooks. Autobiographical elements like the use of garment paper, a nod to his seamstress mother, and the use of sports fields to his dad’s soccer career point to cultural inheritance and genetic memory. Repetition, continuity and duality are seen visually, but also in the referenced texts of the Mayan’s Popol Vuh theme of double visions and W.E.B. Du Bois’ double consciousness. Quevedo’s titles jump between the capitalization of the historic present tense and the de-centering downcase. Additionally, the show’s name, “a l l s t a r s,” is an ocular trick where Quevedo spaces the script to mimic the markings of breaking stitch patterns or scorekeeping tallies.
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