Amanda Valdez - The Deep Way

About

These abstract works, like those in Valdez’s first solo show with the gallery, Wild Child, combine sections of quilting, embroidery, oil stick and gouache into constructions on canvas that make apparent their maker’s hand. This new exhibition adds in sections of hand-woven tapestry that Valdez creates on a loom. In her weaving process, she uses a black warp, so that the colors of her yarns seem to glow forth from the dark background, and she mirrors that process in her areas of gouache painting, in which she layers a washy spread of gouache over a black gesso ground, which gives these painted sections a similar felt depth. In both the weaving and in these overlaid spreads of gouache, the dark under-layer becomes a kind of fertile soil from which these sections emerge, alive — organic in shape and unique in form, and making apparent the human process that built them.