Jovencio De La Paz

Cumulative Shadow

April 9 – May 29

HOLDING Contemporary presents Cumulative Shadow, Jovencio de la Paz’s second solo exhibition with the gallery which opens April 9 and runs through May 29. Gallery hours are by appointment Fridays and Saturdays. Social distancing rules allow for no more than two visitors in the space at a time, and masks are required.

In Cumulative Shadow, Jovencio de la Paz maps the terrain of algorithmic weaving. Each piece is derived from unique software and highlights ideological and conceptual themes rooted in an analysis of formal abstraction and computational logic. The exhibition title “Cumulative Shadow” references imaging conundrums in which layered computer-generated shadows are unable to darken within digital environments. For the artist, the loom acts as a stage upon which these tensions are enacted. Central to these new works is the untranslatable precarity between the digital and the physical.

An online artist talk with Jovencio de la Paz will be held on Saturday, May 1 at 1:00pm PDT, on Zoom. Meeting ID: 855 192 711 Password 060467.

Jovencio de la Paz works in a space between digital technology and hand weaving. Focused on creating specialized designed software and drawing tools, de la Paz collaborates with algorithms, self-generating patterns, and computational creativity to explore the related histories of technology and the loom. The resulting textiles, hand-woven on a computerized Thread Controller loom, display a tension between the physical world and the digital, the organic and technological, and the haptic quality of cloth versus the perceived rigidity of the numerical. De la Paz is an artist, weaver, and educator and their work explores the intersection of textile processes such as weaving, dye, and stitch-work as they relate to broader concerns of language, histories of colonization, migrancy, ancient technology, and speculative futures. Interested in the ways transience and ephemerality are embodied in material, de la Paz looks at how knowledge and experiences are transmitted through society in space and time, whether semiotically by language or haptically by made things. De la Paz is currently Assistant Professor and Curricular Head of Fibers at the University of Oregon.

HOLDING Contemporary presents exhibitions and programs by visual artists across disciplines. Through our curatorial vision and alternative community-driven business model we seek to challenge the economic and social privilege of the art world.

Photos by Mario Gallucci