“The gender equality is in the process as well as in the history which is to be manipulated and played with by artists on the gender spectrum. A generation ago, weaving was women’s work. As of today, I see in my students and my peers [that] they are in search of what they can say through this media about gender that is unique to them but not beholden to one philosophical framework.” — Jovencio de la Paz
Jovencio de la Paz, Warped Grid (1.1), 2022 (Detail) | Image courtesy of the artist, Contemporary Art Library and Sunpride Foundation
Jovencio de la Paz (b. 1986, Republic of Singapore; lives and works in Eugene, Oregon) is an artist, weaver, writer, and educator. With the boarder concerns of language, histories of colonization, migrancy, ancient technology, and speculative futures, de la Paz works in a space between digital technology and hand weaving, exploring the intersecting histories of weaving and modern computers to balance the traditional processes of weaving, dye, and stitch-work with the complexities and contradictions of our present-day digital culture.
Jovencio de la Paz | Image courtesy of the artist
de la Paz received a Bachelor of Fine Art with an emphasis on Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008 and a Master of Fine Art in Fibers from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2012. de la Paz is currently an Assistant Professor and the Curricular Head of Fibers at the University of Oregon. They are also a co-founder of the collaborative group Craft Mystery Cult established in 2010.
Jovencio de la Paz, Exhibition View of “Some Circles, Bent Pyramids, and Warped Grids” at Chris Sharp Gallery in 2022 | Image courtesy of the artist, Chris Sharp Gallery and Contemporary Art Library
Their works have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally, including Museum of Art and Design, New York; San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles; Cranbrook Museum of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI; The 2019 Portland Biennial at Oregon Contemporary; Museum of Craft and Folk-art in Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver; Seoul Arts Center; Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; The 2024 Immigrant Artist Biennial, and among others.
de la Paz’s textile art with queer element
de la Paz was active and interested in identity when they were studying in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to become a painter. They found that the history of craft opened much space about the history of marginalized communities, especially women and queer people of colour, after being recommended to the textile department. “I keep working in the media of weaving and textiles because I believe there is much to be said from the perspective of queer people of color connecting textiles with the history of painting. I am also compelled by demanding the real estate of the wall for narratives other than those prescribed by the Western canon. I love that cloth can slip between wall and floor, between different planes and bodies.”
Jovencio de la Paz, Exhibition View of “Some Circles, Bent Pyramids, and Warped Grids” at Chris Sharp Gallery in 2022 | Image courtesy of the artist, Chris Sharp Gallery and Contemporary Art Library
Interested in conceptual art, especially language-based Fluxus scores, and the ways transience and ephemerality are embodied in material, de la Paz focuses on creating specialized designed software and drawing tools, and collaborates with algorithms, self-generating patterns, and computational creativity to explore the related histories of technology and the loom. “I think about geometry, color, and composition. But above all, I actually attempt to remove myself from being the author of those decisions. I try to let the algorithm create the forms as much as possible. I’m sort of collaborating with the software to generate these abstractions. This also carries a queer element for me, because it de-emphasizes the author.”
Jovencio de la Paz, Some Circles, 2021 | Image courtesy of the artist and Contemporary Art Library
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.
Breaking the rigid binary
Based on software written by the mathematician and Symbiogenesis pioneer Nils AallBaricelli in the 1950s, and the result of a collaboration between de la Paz and the programmer Michael Mack, they combine the handmade with digital technology, playing with the ways the weave can be mapped to pixels. “I have adapted Baricelli’s original software to develop a tool to grow and evolve weave structures for the TC2 loom, capturing the growth and decay as woven cloth instead of graphical visualization. The resulting textiles are self-generating genealogies written line by line, pixel by pixel, by each pass of the weaving shuttle.”
Jovencio de la Paz, Warped Grid (1.0), 2022 | Image courtesy of the artist and Contemporary Art Library
de la Paz is also interested in the conflicted meeting place between human intention, emerging technology, and the ghosts that arise in machines. “Ghosts in the machine” refers to the breaking points of the software that causes unexpected specters of data to emerge, revealing an organic world of liminality, set in contrast to the rigid binaries of 1’s and 0’s.
Jovencio de la Paz, Warped Grid (1.1), 2022 | Image courtesy of the artist and Sunpride Foundation
“Warped Grids” is their on-going series that related to complex geometric abstractions.“Warped Grid (1.0)” juxtaposes white and yellow threads to create hourglass and diamond shapes in various sizes. Some of the white vertical threads dissolve into loose wavy lines, while the yellow horizontal threads remain taut. “Warped Grid (1.1)” with its pale pink, slate gray and lozenged surface against alternating bars of pink and dove gray. Irregular vertical stripes created by weaving light tan and blue threads ebb and flow across “Warped Grid (1.2)” to collect at the center of the composition.
