Jovencio de la Paz

Visual description: Hanging on the wall, the textile piece is woven using a jacquard loom, which uses a system of perforated cards to facilitate the weaving of figured and brocaded fabrics. To visualize the data, the piece has two angular areas of color. One with horizontal stripes of yellow and orange that change into two tones of gray in the middle of the piece. The other, a smaller angular area with horizontal bands of irregular shapes in black, yellow, and blue.

Wall Text: The work of Jovencio de la Paz explores the intersection of the loom and the modern computer. In his series Bionumeric Organism, de la Paz has worked with a program made for early supercomputers from the 1950s. It was used in military research to model generational trajectories of single-cell organisms and used in ballistics. The program is both simple and complex; the evolution of the organism is based on the researcher’s input of characteristics into the binary code—greed or benevolence, for instance. In this series, imagining traits of immigrant populations, de la Paz uses the digital TC2 (Thread Controller 2) Jacquard loom to visualize the ways he has manipulated, hacked, confounded, and fractured his data sets in the 1950s software.

About

Jovencio de la Paz is a fiber artist whose work is situated in the intersection of radically different technologies: the loom and the modern computer. They approach this intersection both as a traditionally trained weaver and a digital native. Pushing design software to the point of failure, they use the digital TC2 (Thread Controller 2) Jacquard loom to manipulate, hack, confound, and fracture design software to explore and test the boundaries of how cloth is typically conceived. Consequently, the works become irreducibly unique “accidents” or formal aberrations. As such, the material history and conceptual nature of the work reflects and embodies the personal politics and non binary identity of the artist not merely as a form of affirmative representation, but rather as a complex space of potential. de la Paz  received a Master of Fine Art in Fibers from the Cranbrook Academy of Art (2012) and a Bachelor of Fine Art with an emphasis on Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2008). They have exhibited work in solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally, most recently at the Museum of Art and Design in New York, NY; Cranbrook Museum of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI; R & Company Gallery in New York, NY; Vacation Gallery in New York, NY; The 2019 Portland Biennial at Disjecta in Portland, OR; The Museum of Craft and Folk-art in Los Angeles, CA; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, CO; Seoul Arts Center, Seoul, South Korea; The Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR; The Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Uri Gallery, Seoul, South Korea, among others. In 2022, de la Paz was awarded the prestigious United States Artists Fellowship for their significant contributions to the field of weaving. Born 1986 in the Republic of Singapore de la Paz lives and works in Eugene, Oregon.