Veronica Prida

The Prida design studio is the platform from which distinctive, personal, edgy, and elegant designs spring to life. Each piece, be it furniture, clothing, or jewelry is thoughtfully designed and executed.

Prida’s one-of-a-kind furniture designs are distinctively indigenous with her use of the huipil in many of the pieces. Prida has been a student and collector of indigenous dress and huipiles of Southern Mexico and Central America for the past 20 years. Her incorporation of these beautiful hand embroidered, woven, and crotched textiles in her furniture pieces is an attempt to honor, preserve, and expose many to the beauty and history of this art form. Some huipiles used in Prida’s works are worn and ‘rescued’ pieces, others were specifically crafted for the piece.

David Shelton Gallery visit - Joey Fauerso and Michael Velliquette

Joey Fauerso

Much of my work involves depictions of the human body as an intersection between nature and culture. Playing on the longstanding equation of nature with sexuality, recent paintings and animations depict sites of ecstasy and eroticism where body and landscape merge into a single entity. In a recent series of watercolors on paper, anthropomorphized landscapes depict intimate acts of dominance and submission, dissolving the boundaries between "inside" and "outside”. In the ‘Wide Open Wide’ series, the western night sky is framed by an open mouth, collapsing the boundaries between body and environment.

Michael Velliquette

Sheets of multi-colored archival card stock are hand-cut then glued, working from background to foreground, onto a paper backing in successive layers. Narratives ranging from the intimate to the epic address ongoing philosophical quandaries of the human condition including questions of self, other, place, transformation and transcendence.

Jerry Cabrera

Light

At the concentration camp site and at the Jewish Museum in Germany I began to consider the importance of light in isolated environments, environments of extreme suffering and environments that are considered sacred, such as a church or cathedral.

With light comes color, and color denotes life. Light is also associated with knowledge, hope, warmth and energy. In architecture light is used as an element of design; and if you consider how the architecture of the prison cells limited the amount of light that made its way in, that light becomes more precious to the person in the cell or in solitary confinement. Psychologically, this may have been the only element of hope present in that type of environment. Light is extremely important because it becomes the only source of visual escape from imprisonment and isolation. When you look outward, for an instance you are not visually aware of your immediate surroundings, and in that instance there is a visual escape that takes place. When people gaze into a sunset they are experiencing that escape simultaneously with the visuals of color spectra created by light. We are free to experience the vastness of light every day when we walk outside into the sun. This body of work was influenced by those who were not, and are not free.

My intention with these paintings is to give the viewer a narrow but vast window of light.

Narrow enough not to physically fit through, but vast enough through which to visually escape.

Ken Little

Working over the years as an artist I have cycled through a number of ideas and images repeatedly.  I make things with my hands. I look at them over a period of time.  I make adjustments until they are right.  It’s a sort of antique indulgence that keeps me centered and disciplined.  It helps me find meaning, and it’s really a lot of fun.

An image that I have cycled through repeatedly is that of the business suit.  In 1988 the first suit, “Buck” was fabricated by sewing $1 bills together.  He was then hung over a lightweight armature so that the suit itself appeared to be occupied and empty at the same time implying an invisible figure.  From 2001-2003, I made a series of  $1 Bill suits in various poses, standing, pledging, flying, dying, etc. They were all over life size and were constructed with $1 bill skins over steel mesh armatures.  They appeared to contain an invisible figure.  All the functional and feeling parts of the occupant were obviously absent.  There were no “guts”, no heart, no arms or legs, no head, no brain, and so forth. They couldn’t do anything. They couldn’t feel anything. These automaton suits symbolized the material world of possessions, commerce, law, politics, and so forth. Also, being absent their functional and feeling parts, the inner void begged the question of the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual nature of life.