Cristina Velásquez: As If It Were the Sun

From Assembly:

“Assembly is pleased to present As If It Were the Sun, new work by Colombian artist, Cristina Velásquez. This is Assembly’s inaugural exhibition at our brick-and-mortar gallery in Houston, Texas and the debut of this body of work. As If It Were the Sun extends the artist’s inquiry into the photographic gaze against issues of identity, history, and colonialism through photographs and photographic weavings made with cardboard. The straight, color photographs are purposeful fragments of larger narratives. Drawing the viewer’s attention to the reductive nature of the medium, this work opposes the photograph’s tendency to distill its subject’s intersectional relationship to the world into a single quality—often viewed from a Western perspective—“the sun.” For Velásquez, the function of the photograph is to explore rather than to define. As If It Were the Sun reorients viewers away from a hegemonic view to a more nuanced position. Velásquez’s gestural crops imply that there is always more than what is presented.”