"area gray" 49 heads by Luis Velasquez

  

"area gray  installation sculpture Luis Velasquez

This is a work of insider criticism. I know the artist and write as a way to add to the conversation about meaning and possibilities.  I mean this in reference to Velasquez's art and the general understand of the varieties of art making in my world. This is not evaluative criticism spring from the idea that writing about art is the production of another art work . A work that stands in relation to the original art work casting light in multiple directions.


 Luis Velasquez takes a news story as a beginning point for an oddly memorative sculptural installation"49 heads." It is a art work that connects Northen Mexico with the pastorial, idealized colon real estate haven of Santa Barbara.  These connections are by a circuitious speculative and entirely contingent route.
     I will delay to discuss the work's sourcing in that I am of the opinion that  there is a huge difference between the source and what might be called the genesis or synthectic power of an art work. This I argue inheres
in the recombinant cross-linking of spaces of concern which bubble in our cultural present.
      The show consists of a set of 49 head like grey concrete elements in a scatter configuration on an equally gray floor.  The room is white walled galleresque mechanical room and the show was a part of the end of term exhibit  at Artium Space UC Santa Barbara. Exposed ventilation and meandering surface mounted electrical conduit and a breaker box suggest an undisclosed wherehouse . It is a space poised at a  grey midpoint between  the nefarious and the sublime. The "head elements"  are variously textured cast and reworked concrete. They lay at  various attitudes. In some orientations facial features allow the viewer to recognize a likeness of the human visage. In other orientations the impression is as only so many strewn concrete boulders.  The idea of industrial trans-vagrent cast offs also comes to mind.  This structured play of recognition and its absence form an associational orbit between the human, communal traces of life and a the forensic pleroma , perhaps the geologic debris field of disregard and abandonment.  The impression is of a "kind of theatre " of reenactment but what is being re-inacted? 
     

At this point one might turn to the source but were something comes from is commonly taken as its explanatory principle, "But it isn't."  I again will delay. 

One is confronted with a field in which a unified determination of the depicted visual referent is at every turn problematized.  The issues of concealment and readability. There are flickers of a visage of humanity and a kind of cold abandonment which refuse to cohere. Meaning shifts and rolls restlessly in the mind. 
    But what is the source you ask?  The source is the end not the beginning. The source is where you went not where you came from. You will find it where all our modern answers lie- on the internet- search "49 headless" "mexico,"  All the questions thereafter become mute.
   

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