Jovencio de la Paz Fall 2017 Exhibition
“Broken Symmetry”
Marylhurst Art Gym
October 1, 2017 – December 13, 2017
For the exhibition “Broken Symmetry,” Jovencio de la Paz has included three new weavings representing forthcoming bodies of work. Woven on a TC2 Digital Jacquard Loom, “Harmony of the Spheres” is the first of a series of textiles derived from Science-Fiction novels, essays, and fabulations. Looking to the works of Ursula K. LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Ray Bradbury, and Frank Herbert, these realized, imaginary textiles are future ancients, specters of speculative events. “The girl told the story cried,” is an analysis of human/machine miscommunication. Perfect circles drawn in the space of the digital become irregular, contorted, and stretched ellipses: material distortions of ideal forms captured in thread on the digital loom. The sentence, “The girl told the story cried” is a classic example of a Garden Path sentence: a grammatically correct sentence that is difficult to parse because of syntactical aberrations speckled throughout the English language. Such sentences are Victorian brain teasers, whose meanings are often poetic reflections on the human condition. However, they are also used in Turning tests to evaluate the competence of Artificial Intelligence.
Simone DeSousa Gallery
October 21, 2017 – December 31, 2017
For the exhibition “MoreLand,” organized by Sarah Turner and Iris Eichenberg, Jovencio de la Paz has produced an edition of blankets responding to the exhibition’s theme, focused on hardware stores. Modeled after repeating stacks and organized piles of materials like dry-wall, plywood, and other flat-goods, the overshot patterns in these blankets are designs generated by simple mathematical accretion and jostling.
Ditch Projects
October 14, 2017 – November 11, 2017
Evoking notions of Colorfield painting, Op Art, Colonial textiles, and DIY culture, “Brand New Rug” is comprised of two large scale weaving installations. While two brightly colored rag rugs span the entire gallery floor, an accumulation of overshot textiles precariously leans against the wall. The works consider the uncertain status of cloth, often occupying a contested and fluid space between utility, artifact, image, structure, crafted thing, and carrier of history.