Quarry
Stefan Gonzales
Sept 13 – Oct 18
with a concurrent Exhibition at Specialist Sept 4 - October 18
Artist Talk September 26th, 7 pm with Art & Culture Week
Stefan Gonzales presents two simultaneous solo shows, one at The Vestibule and one at Specialist gallery in Pioneer Square. One exhibition represents a death of a long project, and the other a birth of a new project. In these paired projects, Gonzales documents the dissolution of rock salt and a stone’s journey home.
Gonzales, a Prio-Manso-Tiwa and a trans-nonbinary individual, focuses on decolonizing and feminizing the aesthetics of land art. They chronicle the lives of objects through photography, sculpture, and installation.
Selected by The Seattle Times on of the Top Shows to see this fall!
Artist Statement (excerpt)
Quarry is a love letter, a eulogy, and an obsessive archive. It marks the transition of a 10-year relationship between me and a collection of quarry stones taken from a temporary driveway in North Ballard, Seattle, WA. These stones have held occupations such as: art objects, a fire pit, door stops, paper weights, and aquarium decor, to name a few.
This exhibition walks you through the final moments of my role as caretaker for these stones. For the last time, they have been cleaned, catalogued, and finally reintroduced to the wild.
Each performance has been filmed and then broken down into still images. These images are then compiled in stacks or grids. While each performance may vary in length, their visual representations remain fairly symmetrical to one another, thus highlighting our ability to obscure and manipulate our own archives and history.
— Stefan Gonzalez
Curatorial Statement: On Documentation
Gonzales identifies their Indigiqueer history in their artist statement, mentions concern with land and land art. But Gonzales’s work itself does not make a declarative statement. Gonzales’s practice is documentation.
Documentation places a time stamp on an object, marking a time it was seen and a time it is seen again. Documentation places a frame of significance around an object. The frame can be lifted into a place such as a museum, a home, a message, another object. The frame can be oriented toward a viewer, a witness.
Today, you are one of those witnesses.
I find that experiencing their work is like walking into a landscape and spotting someone, facing away from you, observing something you can’t yet see. By the time you approach, they're gone. There’s something to see here, you’re sure – something was witnessed. But what did it mean to the one who saw it? Would mean the same for you? That depends on who you are and who they are. And so, quietly, the content of the subjects, the witnesses, their histories and biographies fades in.
Land in this art exists mainly as quarried rock, depicted mostly in photos — as documentation. They are just rocks from a quarry, any quarry. There is no special Nature, no pure thing, no Land, no thing in itself to find here. All the things around us have been quarried – cut by a mixture of intention and inattention, marked by human action.
“We clamor for the right to opacity” - Eduoard Glissant
Gallery Hours
Fri 12-5
Sat 12-5
& by appointment