The fiber works in Jovencio de la Paz’s solo exhibition “Cumulative Shadow” are not as simple as they appear. For most of these pieces, de la Paz employed a computerized Thread Controller 2 loom and custom weaving software to create textile swatches with unpredictable patterns, which were then sewn together with panels of raw canvas and wrapped around stretchers. The resulting compositions oscillate between glitchy-looking digital images and lushly wrought abstractions—renderings that grew from a deft combination of order and chaos. These objects go beyond the two-dimensional: Each work comprises a seemingly endless number of stitches layered millimeter over millimeter, generating the illusion of impossible depths. Their soft rectangles (there are no right angles) in grays, browns, and navy, with a few vibrant swaths of yellow, red, and orange, act as entry points to de la Paz’s investigations into a kind of formalism birthed by algorithmic computation.
One such woven piece, Bionumeric Organisms 2.0, 2021, hints at a mysterious evolutionary process. Though it is the most rigid of its similarly titled siblings, the work’s panels—colored dark blue, crimson, gold, and slate—seem unsure if they want to be organized or not. Their would-be straight lines stretch, bow, and sag, as if stuck mid-mutation. Are they escaping some kind of prescribed order or morphing into one?
In Legacy Russell’s 2020 book, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, the author writes that “errors, ever unpredictable, surface the unnamable, point toward a wild unknown. To become an error is to surrender to becoming unknown, unrecognizable, unnamed. . . . This state of opacity is a ripe error to reach toward, an urgent and necessary glitch.” De la Paz actively yields to the creative potential of supposed failures by encouraging spontaneity, rupture, play, and freedom.
— Amelia Rina
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