Joey Veltkamp. Tell your heart that I’m the one

About

Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present “tell your heart that i’m the one,” Joey Veltkamp's first Los Angeles solo exhibition. For “tell your heart that i’m the one,” Veltkamp aims to collapse the distance between the Pacific Northwest and Los Angeles through the filter of Twin Peaks, a fictional town set less than sixty miles away from where he works and lives.

“We live inside a dream.”

Throughout time, humans have wrestled with the concept of reality. From Daoist Chiang Tzu’s Dream of the Butterfly, to René Descartes, up to present day philosopher-physicists like Nick Bostrum.

Are we the dreamer? Or are we the dream?

Cinematic auteur David Lynch has created an entire career around the concept of challenging the notion of a conventional reality. Through his queer Northwest-folk lens of quilts and soft-paintings, Veltkamp explores this idea through key moments in Lynch’s (and Twin Peaks' co-creator Mark Frost's) world-building to explore topics of alternate realities, nostalgia, and queer politics. Veltkamp’s work functions equally as a shelter and a beacon for those that need its shelter, a safe space for those unaware they needed the safety and comfort of the spaces he creates.

Joey Veltkamp (born 1972 in Helena, Montana) is a queer artist who uses bright and colorful imagery to comfort the viewer. By elevating every day common items, such a list of summer berries or a plastic bucket of flowers, he reminds us to celebrate life and look for joy in unexpected places.

His inaugural solo museum exhibition, SPIRIT!, opened at Bellevue Arts Museum in 2022. Joey’s work has been collected by Seattle Art Museum, Microsoft, Meta, Starbucks, King County Portable Works, and others. He received an Artist Trust GAP Grant in 2019, and is a previous Neddy Award Finalist (2010, 2014). His "soft paintings" have been shown at Tacoma Art Museum, Frye Art Museum, Bellevue Arts Museum, Seattle Art Museum, and San Luis Obispo Museum of Art. Joey has lived in the Puget Sound region since 1996. He has five cats and one husband. He is represented by Greg Kucera Gallery.