RONNY QUEVEDO
EVERY MEASURE OF ZERO

March 7 – April 27, 2019
First Thursday opening March 7, 6:00 to 8:00pm
Artist Q & A Wednesday, April 17 at 6:00pm (event will be full - please RSVP here)

THE WORK
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.

Please contact us for pricing and availability.

THE ARTIST
Ronny Quevedo (b. 1981, Guayaquil, Ecuador) works in a variety of mediums including sculpture and drawing. Quevedo's work was included in the Whitney Museum’s recent exhibition Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art. Previous solo exhibitions of note include no hay medio tiempo / there is no halftime at Queens Museum (2017) and Home Field Advantage at Casita Maria Center for Arts & Education in the Bronx (2015). His many accolades include a Queens Museum/Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists and A Blade of Grass Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art, as well as residencies at Socrates Sculpture Park; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council; the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Maine, among others. He holds an MFA from the Yale School of Art (2013) and BFA from The Cooper Union (2003). He is artist in residence at Smack Mellon in New York through summer 2019.

PRESS
Making Space: Ronny Quevedo Interviewed by Louis Bury - BOMB
How Maps, Migration and Soccer Inspire Artist Ronny Quevedo - Portland Monthly