DERRICK VELASQUEZ | The Continents

Robischon Gallery is pleased to present concurrent solo exhibitions highlighting the influence and connected progression of three Robischon artists: Judy Pfaff (NY), Ann Hamilton (OH), and Derrick Velasquez (CO). The distinctive exhibitions on view feature a wide range of media including prints, painting, photography, and collage while presenting a glimpse of each artists’ individual approach toward sculpture.

As background, in order of lineage, artist Judy Pfaff is recognized as a true trailblazer of Installation Art and unconventional printmaking. The esteemed MacArthur Fellow, whose numerous honors include NEA grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the International Sculpture Center Lifetime Achievement Award, continues to innovate using wildly exuberant, unorthodox materials and exhibiting her mastery in myriad disciplines encompassing sculpture, drawing, and print. In the 1980s, Pfaff’s expertise led to a professorship at Yale University School of Art, her alma mater, where she became teacher and mentor to now acclaimed artist Ann Hamilton.

Ann Hamilton has since established herself as an internationally celebrated multimedia artist recognized for her expansive installations, public projects, and evocative performances. Also a MacArthur Fellow, Hamilton creates immersive experiences in site-responsive works that sensitively consider a conscious presence within the spaces they occupy and revealing her articulated understanding of the body, sound, and movement. As the 48^th Venice Biennale’s American representative, Hamilton has garnered widespread recognition including the prestigious National Medal of Arts, and to note for this exhibition, as a distinguished professor at The Ohio State University in the early 2000s Hamilton taught artist Derrick Velasquez.

Emboldened by Hamilton’s instruction, Derrick Velasquez emerged as a pronounced multimedia artist himself, incorporating unique uses of non-art materials such as vinyl, leaded glass, and resin to deconstruct decorative architectural and art historical hierarchies. Also receiving various awards and acknowledgements including the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters and Sculptors, Velasquez shows widely nationally and is deeply allied with the Denver art community as an active collaborator and respected artistic voice.

The lineage surrounding each of the exhibited artists offers a diverse, yet subtly interconnected, language of influence and innovation.  

DERRICK VELASQUEZ

“The Continents”

“’The Continents’ is an exhibition inspired by Tiepolo’s study for ‘Apollo and the Four Continents’ which I encountered at the Morgan Library in New York in November 2023. The painting portrays a common theme of baroque iconography:  the Sun-God Apollo, in airy pastels, rules from heaven above the four continents (Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe) made up of darker, more corporeal allegorical and non-allegorical figures. Tiepolo, known for his theatrical style and unconventional compositions, eventually translated this study to a masterpiece fresco at the Wurzbürg Residence in Germany which combines German baroque and French Chateau styles of the mid-18^th century. I was taken by the arrangement of color and figures within the study as well as the final fresco where Tiepolo allowed a diversity of elements to find their gravity around each other and found many of the works I was making in the studio revolved around the underpinnings of the fresco as they could be read contemporarily visually or conceptually. ‘The Continents’ makes use of these compositional strategies to navigate Abstraction, redaction, secular and ecclesiastical power, colonization, resource extraction, and architectural ornamentation as individual fragments with multiple functions. They emerge from the exhibition, teased out in the form of variation, and are then absorbed back into it reflecting and echoing off each other as one moves through the space.”

The Sculptures

“My ‘Untitled’ series of vinyl and wood wall sculptures fluctuate between floating and grounded and focus most directly on the colors of Tiepolo’s fresco in Treppenhaus at the Wurzbürg Residence. Apollo emerges among the heavens as a heliacal body in white, lavender and gradients of flesh tone. Although not completely centered in the overall image, (This was extremely uncommon for portrayals of Apollo in relation to the continents.), all of the other color arrangements become more muted and darker towards the periphery, akin to a sunrise or sunset when there is a momentary flattening of distance caused by atmospheric interference. Here, the colors shift from pinks and whites to blues and blacks with hints of the pastel color ranges embedded within. The vinyl sculptures become weighty bodies orbiting the space creating connections through color to other works in the exhibition. In particular, Untitled 445, the largest vinyl wall sculpture, looks directly to Apollo and the surrounding clouds for its palette.

Across the room is a floor sculpture made of pale pink ornamental trim tied in knots. This work came from experiments where I cast crown molding in silicone rubber, giving them a floppy alternative to their typical rigid form. This pile looks as though it were stripped from the boundary of an ornate room, twisted in a humorous form, and placed in a pile on the ground. Due to the nature of the shape and placement of the individual double-knotted components, the form takes on a radial symmetry that whirlpools in on itself much like the image of Apollo in Tiepolo’s fresco adding to its gravity as it humbly sits directly on the concrete floor.

A new body of work using opaque black stained glass, made with the traditional leaded technique, subverts the typical spiritual use of brightly colored glass and light. For over a thousand years, stained glass windows have been mounted in churches to exemplify the idea that God is light, and when it passes through the windows it is akin to the light of God passing through a person. By using black glass and ornamental patterns such as egg and dart, I am denying this use of spiritual power structures and creating an opacity that reflects the self. In You think you’re evil, but you’re not I wanted to mimic the height and proportion of stained-glass windows that might be in a church while removing it from the job of liminal membrane to become more of a banner. While recent use of stained glass has become decorative, I’m extracting this craft form out of the wall and giving the work weighty objecthood that relates to its complicated past. The title is lifted from the song “You’re Not Evil” by Black Flag which deals with the trappings of societal expectations and guilt by repeating the phrase over and over again as an affirmation.” 

The Paintings

“My series of small paintings utilizes a personal photographic archive of ornamentation from traditional royal and military portraiture. The intent of this kind of portrait is meant to establish the face of the sitter, usually wealthy or famous, rendered with high detail. Everything below the head such as epaulets, draped fabric, jewelry, or military medals is commonly made up of hasty painterly brushstrokes. I crop this specific area as a not-so-subtle rejection of the person (really cutting off at the head) to instead chunk off a decorative element, and in a sense, create a new portrait that is a ruin of the original. Many times, it’s a portrait of the ever-ubiquitous George Washington after a battle by one of the Peale family of painters, and I liken these to fragments one might see of a felled statue from a bygone era.”

The Collages

“The ‘Trim Void’ collage series taps into similar ideas of heavenly color gradients framed by crown molding sourced from books about Versailles. Many frescoes like Tiepolo’s Apollo and the Continents are bordered by the most luxurious baroque ornamentation created. The collages flatten space within these boundaries by way of simple compositions that layer and stack on top of one another. While repeated patterns in crown molding typically create certainty and grounding, the voids call into question space and distance beyond what we know. This runs counter to Tiepolo’s fresco at Würzburg where its commissioner desired to cement himself as a ruling figure through imagery and architecture.”

The Resins

“For my series of cast resin sculptures made of self-made aggregates. each form has different combination of Colorado Yule Marble, magnetite from the California San Joaquin River Delta, and sandstone from Red Rocks Park; all of which have a distinctive color and have been removed by different means. The history of Yule Marble exemplifies a boom-and-bust economy of extractive mining towns with the Rocky Mountain-specific quarry going through many ownership changes and presently being owned by Italian companies that were based out of Carrara known for its high-grade marble. Yule marble is famous for cladding many American monuments and buildings such as the Lincoln Memorial and The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The magnetite comes from the San Joaquin River Delta which reaches all the way to California’s most inland port of Stockton which neighbors Lodi, the town I grew up in. Magnetite is a form of iron oxide that is black and relates to a childhood memory of collecting the material at the elementary school my dad taught at while he worked in his classroom on the weekends. The distinctive red silt and sand from Red Rocks Park in Morrison, Colorado is a hallmark that colors my regional landscape. These elements are monuments to deep time formed and broken down over millennia and incomprehensible to the human mind. By reconstituting these minerals from disparate and specific sites into my own aggregates and casting them into traditional architectural ornamental forms I’m asking how we think about resources and ornamentation in the present day as it relates to our recent and far off pasts.”   

- Derrick Velasquez

A recipient of a prestigious Joan Mitchell Award, Colorado artist Derrick Velasquez has a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, CA and an M.F.A. from The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH. His awards and residencies include: MacDowell Colony Fellow, MassMoCA Assets for Artist Residency, William and Dorothy Yeck Young Sculptors Competition Purchase Award, Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum Artist Fellow, Colorado Creative Industries Career Advancement Award, Vertigo Art Space Artist Residency (as Stapleford Collective), Denver, CO, Redline Artist Residency - Denver, CO from 2010-2012, Juror's Pick: Tricia Robson - Icebreaker 2.0, Ice Cube Gallery, Denver, CO 2011, Best In Show - Boxcar Gallery Annual Juried Show and the Fergus Family Material Award - The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH. Velasquez has exhibited in solo and group museum exhibitions as well as numerous university galleries, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO; the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, CO; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM; the Frame Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University, PA; Hiestand Gallery, Miami University, Oxford, OH; Vicki Myhren Gallery, University of Denver, Denver, CO; Curfman Gallery, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO; Hopkins Hall Gallery, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH; along with Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum based out of Denver, CO. His work is represented in select private and corporate collections such as Fidelity Investments; Miami University, Oxford, OH; Dikeou Collection, Denver, CO; and the Colorado Convention Center, among others. Velasquez is a founding member of Tank Studios and Tilt West, both based out of Denver, CO. Velasquez’s 2017 solo exhibition, “Obstructed View,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and his organization of the museum’s open shelf library space called “The Stacks” were well received.