September 14th, 2024 – November 17th, 2024
Opening Reception Hours: 6 PM - 9 PM, Saturday, September 14th, 2024

Hawthorn Contemporary is pleased to announce the opening of Derrick Velasquez’ solo exhibition ‘Cascade and Cadence’.

 

“My work places sculpture and installation in conversation with architecture and design. My focus on the modern aesthetics and ornamentation of contemporary residential buildings created in urban developments critiques the social, political and economic forces affecting our everyday psychological experience within a city by looking at the physical spaces we occupy. Through observation and research, I manipulate common construction materials, architectural crown molding, and leaded stained glass to at once parody historical bourgeois aesthetics and challenge high brow modern architecture, art and design. These works come in the form of large-scale installations and sculptures as well as photography, collage and other media. Physical space and direct relationship to these installations and objects are instrumental in making the conceptual connection between our own bodies and the buildings and structures we interact with on a daily basis.”

 

Derrick Velasquez is an artist and exhibition organizer who lives and works in Denver, Colorado. He was a 2017 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters and Sculptors and a 2019 MacDowell Fellow. Derrick has served on the Denver Commission on Cultural Affairs and the boards of Denver nonprofits Tilt West, Union Hall, and Minerva Projects. His most recent exhibitions include solo shows at The Herron School of Art and Design, The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Robischon Gallery (Denver), Pentimenti (Philadelphia), Carvalho Park (Brooklyn), Galerie Robertson Ares (Montreal) and The Black Cube Nomadic Museum, and group exhibitions at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Transmitter in New York. Derrick founded Yes Ma’am Projects, an artist-run gallery in the basement of his Athmar Park home and Friend of a Friend, a new project space in the Evans School, a mostly vacant schoolhouse in Downtown Denver. He has organized exhibitions at the MCA in Denver, Trestle Gallery in New York, The Carnegie in Covington, Kentucky and at Galerie Robertson Arés in Montreal