Chispa
September 28 – November 9, 2024
Opening: Saturday, September 28, 6 - 9 pm
Rusha & Co. is excited to present Chispa, a solo exhibition of editioned collage works by Los Angeles artist, curator, and spiritual worker Ever Velasquez. Velasquez appropriates the language of advertising, pulling photographic images from her vast personal archive of magazines and recombining them in vibrant, energetic compositions that speak to the visual and attentional onslaught of modern life. The works offer a positivity and gentleness that is often at odds with contemporary motives. She proposes a kinder, more connected way of being through celebrations of beauty and sisterhood, life and community. The world she creates is inherently spiritual, its currency blessings and care, its existence an acknowledgement of the divine in all of us.
The title of the exhibition refers to the spark of creativity, the sudden burst of energy in which the works came about. Velasquez’s process begins with glossy pages carefully selected from an archive of magazines years in the making, from which specific images are cut and arranged into large pieces of paper. The image itself dictates the size of the composition, which is cut to size, scanned, and printed at scale on archival paper. Velasquez builds upon a robust history of collage, drawing inspiration from such diverse sources as Matisse’s cut-paper paintings and 90s punk zines. She transforms her materials into vessels for a particular message of peace and positivity. In so doing, she transmutes the vernacular of mass media, to which the modern viewer is studiously attuned, into a language of spiritual abundance.
Ever Velasquez
SO fRESH AND SO cleannnn, 2024
archival pigment print
21 x 24 in.
22½ x 25½ in. (framed)
Edition of 3
