December 2nd - 7th 2014

Reception : Thursday, December 4th 7-10PM

Michael Vasquez lives and works in Miami. His work has been exhibited at numerous museums and institutions, both nationally and internationally, including the Kemper Museum of Art in Kansas City MO, Miami Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Museum of Contemporary Art Scottsdale, the University of Tennessee, and Saatchi Gallery in London. 

Currently, Vasquez's work is included in "Portraiture Now : Staging the Self," on view at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC through April 12th 2015, at which point the exhibition will begin to travel nationally.

I employ a variety of techniques. I learned ceramics mostly from apprenticing in a production pottery studio when I was a kid. I have become more interested in the ceramic process recently, but for the most part I use clay as a medium to achieve a particular end. That is not to say that I abandon craft but I tend to let the vision guide the construction and not the other way around. I have had over 30 years experience working with clay so I feel comfortable with the medium but I will abandon process if it becomes unnecessary or gets in the way of where I want a piece to go.

I would consider my style a miss mash of Punk Rock, Pop Surrealist, and Pre-Columbian imagery with some 1950's advertisement thrown in for good measure. So really it is just a reaction to the things I like that are around me everyday. I have a fairly large collection of paintings and I look to artists out side of ceramics for inspiration

Santa Fe is like no other city in the US and if you add in Northern New Mexico you get a landscape and a people that are more unique than anyplace on the Earth. The original inhabitants can trace their history back Tens of THOUSANDs of years, newcomers (The Spanish) can go back 500 years and us Johnny come latelys (Anglos mostly) have been migrating to New Mexico since the Mexican American War and there was a big influx of artists in the 1920s. It is a very welcoming place. 

Northern New Mexico is very laid back and very liberal. I sometimes call it the Island of Misfit Toys, because if you don’t fit in anywhere else you can fit in here. I also call it the Land of Shirley MacClaine I don’t think I need to explain that. There is a very lively arts scene; you might say you can’t spit without hitting an artist. And it runs the gamut from very traditional style painters ie landscape, still lives, portraits, figurative style bronze work, to cutting edge installation and performance and everything in between. Imagine a 400-year-old city in the middle of the wilderness, desert on one side old growth forested mountains on the other with about 60,000 inhabitants, yet there is a world class opera and opera house, a symphony, a dozen major museums over 300 galleries, restaurants, shops, micro breweries, I could go on. It’s really quite something. But you have to dig in, get to know the place, it can be like the five blind men describing an elephant. You can’t just sit and wait for it to reveal itself to you. You have to let down your guard and be willing to get off the beaten path. I think that to some visitors it has a "Mall Like" feel to it, at least on the surface. Some people come here expecting a Disneyland experience and leave not ever knowing where they were or what they missed.

I would say that Michael Lucero was an early influence on me as far as ceramics are concerned. But most of my influences come from painters like Mark Ryden, Kenny Scharf, Todd Schorr, Keith Haring. I was influenced very early on by Punk Rock, I was living in London at the time that the Sex Pistols, Siouxie and the Banshees, Chron Gen, The X-Ray Specs, etc were on the scene. I still listen to that music and the new stuff today. I would also say I have been heavily influenced by the ceramics from Pre-Columbian civilizations most notably, Teotihuacan, Mayan, and the Tsistiquate, but not limited to those, also many Peruvian and Andean cultures.

I don’t really have an answer for this question. I use commercial glazes in my work and can usually anticipate what the outcome will be. There is some variation that happens when you give up a piece to the fire but in today’s world I don’t see any reason why I should not use commercial glazes any more that I would expect a painter to be grinding their own pigment and mixing their own medium. Naturally if something does go awry I pull out the paint, in fact some of my surfaces are entirely painted or a combination of paint and glaze. 

Yes here is a description of an installation I am building for the “End of Days” exhibit that will be taking place this fall in Santa Fe.

The piece is titled "Bride of the Bomb" 

 

My plan is this.

 

The small pieces are going to be based on these ghost figures that I have various molds of, they are from the nineteen fifties and look like a person wrapped in a sheet carrying a pumpkin. The figures are going to stay the same but we are going to swap out the pumpkin with different items, accessory items like shoes or purses, skulls, bombs, missiles, guns, etc…

 

The three big pieces will be comprised of: A wedding cake tank that will have a skeleton bride riding on top. The cake will be decorated with skulls and weapons and icing. The next piece will be a missile launcher decorated in a similar fashion, and the final piece will be an atom bomb on wheels with an apocalyptic figure riding it kinda like the cowboy at the end of Dr Strangelove.

 

I am seeing the entire thing set up on a catwalk like a fashion show runway. The atom bomb will lead followed by a block of 12 or so of the ghost figures set up like they are marching, followed by the rocket launcher followed by another block of ghosts followed up by the wedding cake.

 

So it will have the look of a fashion show runway crossed with a Communist May Day military parade. The whole set up could be as much as 18 to 20 feet long and appx 3 - 4 feet wide.

 

Bacon’s work definitely has been an influence for me in many ways. As a young kid, I was surrounded by my mother’s collection of art catalogues and coffee-table books. One of my favorites happened to be an old Tate Gallery catalogue on Bacon. Thumbing through the pages, there was something about his paintings that really grabbed me and made a severe impression in my mind… those dark geometric shapes that seemed to go deep into the painting were in such stark contrast to those soft organic piles of barely distinguishable forms of flesh. For the first time I had a sense as to what it was to be moved by art. I realized that not only was art created with emotion but it also conveyed an emotion that was for me, in this case, brilliantly haunting. I knew this was the type of feeling I wanted to come through in my work.

Now that the Dublin Biennial has wrapped up and a majority of my entries for up coming competitions have been sent off… I’ve decided to lock myself away in the studio to concentrate on producing new works. There will be a solo exhibition of my work at the monOrchid gallery in Phoenix toward the end of the year as well as a possible two-person exhibit in Germany in early 2015. 

 

I think the first time I remember being into photography was when I got a 35mm auto for a 

birthday when I was 10 or so. I took the camera everywhere but I didn’t take that many pictures. I 

guess I couldn’t find anything exciting to photograph from my position in life.   

 

Since then I’ve gone through two college programs, moved at least 10 times, visited a couple countries, and cultivated colorful friendships with interesting people. I think through all of these experiences I began to see differently and use my camera to define what I see. Nowadays, I take pictures with lots of space and color in them. I also take a ton of pictures, ­like 1,400 to make one final piece. Someone told me once that the best photographers have taken the best pictures….and also taken the most bad pictures. It’s a constant learning experience and I like that I’m evolving with it.  

 

 

I’ve seen people condense time into single images before; ­I didn’t invent the technique. Mostly 

I’ve seen it used to compress frames from a movie into some sort of painterly representation of 

the whole movie. As with the history of photography ­ it’s all been done before. I’m a firm believer that if I’m going to make a picture and use a style that exists, which they all do, I had better devote my entire strength to it and do it the best.  

 

Eadward Muybridge is one of my most influential figures in the history of photography because 

over 100 years ago he did invent a new technique that expanded peoples minds and condensed 

their sensibility about the universe. I took a process and made it my own because it gives me the platform to express my ideas of expanding the frame of the camera, capturing elemental 

transitions and creating a sense of figure-­ground reversal. I hope that the process somewhat 

evaporates as people start to understand the ideas intertwined into each slice in the pictures. 

 

I had the opportunity to work on a project at ASU Art Museum with an artist couple from Athens. I was the ‘student’ photographer interning under them and learning about relational aesthetics through their project. Contradictory to social practice I was looking at blue chip gallery websites and reading a lot of their resources on contemporary art. At the closing of the exhibition I turned in all of my photographs. I did such a good job they hired me for the next year to work on a wide range of projects and my images were used for national grant applications, catalogues, press and seasonal brochures. It was an excellent way to be introduced to my arts community. I also got to meet some important artists such as Chip Lord, Miguel Palma, Julianne Swartz and work directly with many of them on projects. It is a symbiotic way of working commercially without confusing my artistic reputation. 

Many of the projects I’ve worked on are with museums or established programs which means its got a fair amount of certainty in the timeline and structure. CrossCurrent was different because it 

was built from the ground up in a  short amount of time by a small group. I signed on not knowing 

exactly what was going to happen although I was confident in the groups ability to pull it off. It 

was exciting because during the month there were revelations, sales, new friendships, fancy parties and a lot of photography. I shot all of the art prior to installation, which never happens. I was sending out files to the group immediately to use for press on a seemingly daily basis. There was a lot of energy and a collective desire to make it an explosion in Phoenix, which I think is what ended up happening.  

 

Israel was grass roots. It was a long process and it’s still happening. It started through an artist, Meirav, from Agrippas 12 Gallery in Jerusalem visiting Phoenix with her husband. He worked for IBM and there’s an office here. She came to downtown Phoenix and wandered into the gallery co­op I was part of, Eye Lounge. My friend Crystal met her and introduced her to the gallery owner Greg, who had lived in Jerusalem for two years. Eye Lounge came up with the idea of having a traveling show with Agrippas 12. Fast forward a year. Crystal moved and I took over the project. We teamed up with ASU Art Museum’s Desert Initiative and had four exhibitions in two countries. Eye Lounge artists shipped work to Israel and had a show for the season opening in Jerusalem, referred to as Manofim. We exhibited at Agrippas 12 twice and at THE Gallery in the Negev Desert once. The Israeli artists work was held up in customs for four months!!! So we pushed their show until we got the work. Currently, Meirav and I are putting something together dealing with discarded roads in remote areas of the desert. We wanted to keep the focus on ‘arid’ because the landscape and climate are what brings us together. More to come... 

 

So, last year I was awarded the Emerging Artist Grant from Contemporary Forum at Phoenix Art Museum. The award was a check to finance a new piece and a wall space at the museum once the work was made. That year went by so fast I couldn’t even believe it. I decided to use this opportunity to refocus my studio practice and slow down, which meant make less work on a 

bigger scale. I refined my understanding of the time lapse process and why I was so interested in it. I think I was trying to create a overly beautiful image that was also disjointed or destabilizing in some way. I made “Day Into Night Into Day” during the winter over a two day period of shooting and a couple of weeks assembling the image. I spend quite a bit of time with proofs looking for something wrong with this piece. I was excited that this piece had achieved a sense of 

continuum with this work as well as a the scale I needed to take over the viewers peripheral sights. I thought of this work as a sort of scroll and was also keeping in mind my experiences in Beijing and the ways Chinese masters depicted the sky. 

 

 

 

Indeed LA! I was born in Culver City 30 long years ago. Back then it wasn’t full of galleries and studios and I didn’t know I was going to grow up to be an artist. I only lived there for two years but I’ve always wanted to return and have the experience of living there as an adult. Now, it seems the stars have aligned because I have a purpose living there.