Writings about my art.
I've been extremely fortunate to have some of my favorite writers author various essays about my work for different exhibitions.
Wisdom of the underworld
by Ben Gannon
Essay for Vignettes / Heartbreak Simulation post-mortem, 2017
Arriving at Joey Veltkamp’s February 2017 Vignettes exhibit, it was clear from the street looking into Rachel and John’s house that this show was dealing with the supernatural. Hanging in the front room window were sheer fabric panels with appliqué patches of heavily shadowed and made-up eyes announced the other-worldliness. Spirits are present and in many forms. A haunted space, like all indoor spaces at the end of winter, so charged with telekinetic and telepathic energy of its occupant(s). A haunted house, but in January (unlike October) we are familiar with ghosts, and in the January of this year the powers of naked death ascended to the leadership of the world.
Once inside and in the first room of the show there hangs, along with the sheer panels, a large black quilt. It is composed of spells and talismans, each smaller square housing a symbol of power and protection, an anchor point from which to journey into darkness. Skulls, crystals, pentagrams, the word “protect” in appliquéd ‘wood’ letters—homage to Gretchen Frances Bennett’s found stick word art.
Sharing the space with the eyes and the spell quilt were a pair of pillows placed on chairs, each with a broken heart emoji, invoking the kind and tragic power of Laura Palmer, another symbol of strength and resistance. It becomes clear that wherever the journey of these artworks is headed, grounding in power is necessary and some danger is present or lies ahead.
In the next room more sheer panels hang in the windows and more eyes look out from the gauzy material. Along with the eyed panels there was a table full of small ceramic ghosts painted up like the cosmos and sitting on small, round mirror disks, the infinity of their motif reflecting into infinity. There is little distinction in Joey’s work between outer space and the underworld – vacuum and death both infinite and un-survivable phenomenon.
Binding this second room with the first was a pair of flags and a new motif for Joey’s work – a black cat appears on the flags, almost identical to each other—the latter done by memory, on opposite faces of a wall, each with the phrase Déjà Vu appearing on it, the lettering the same but the colors slightly different and the cat figure in slightly different positions. This diptych is a direct reference to the movie The Matrix, where the repeated sighting of the same black cat as an experience of deja vu is revealed to be an indicator that there has been a significant change made to the fabric of the world of the matrix. Not only a personification of the phenomena of change, the cat is our familiar and our guide while traveling through the dimensions.
Also hanging with the eyes, the cats, and the cosmic ghosts is one of three quilts of its kind in the show. Multi-tonal, textured blacks patched together, the chorus of darkness interrupted with flashes of heat and light in the form of randomly sized triangles, trapezoids, parallelograms and rhombuses of color. Two more of these burning landscapes hang on the walls leading up the stairs to the final room of the show. Akin to the blending of the underworld with outer space depicted with the ceramic ghosts, the landscapes depicted in these three quilts is both of the fire of space and the fires of hell. Accompanied by the indifferent harbinger in the form of the black cat, we are walking with Joey through the cosmic underworld.
The final space of the show, past the watching eyes and glittering ghosts and burning voids, is the bedroom upstairs. The sole artwork in the room is a quilt lying on the bed. The cats again appear; this time en masse and in distinctly different poses, on the quilt upstairs, the resident housecat Brigitte having found a comfortable spot for itself on the bed as well.
But what are the lessons from hell and the vacuum, of walking through this heartbreak simulation? Joey’s work participates strongly in the realm of the pop culture oracular, pulling in and manipulating the signs of culture of the moment, playing in their subtleties and shifting them around before casting them back in to the infinite sign constellation in the form of fabric objects with meanings made from Joey’s particular alchemy of working with sadness and elementally reconfiguring it into joy.
But all oracles have limits to their vision into the ocean of possibilities. And it is the brave or unprotected oracles that, in the midst of confusion, go deeper, towards the leveling wisdom of infinity and death, and the freedom brought forth from acknowledging that wisdom. In the face of the cruel madness and absurdity so evident in our world at this time, the reminder of our death is a reminder of our life. In the face of the infinite void of space, we are able to refocus on ourselves with a grounded perspective.
But it is not all grim contemplations of death and freedom and endless emptiness, and the cats in their various poses on the final quilt in the show remind us of that. With each change or glitch in the fabric of our worlds, with each appearance of the cat as a harbinger of change, there nonetheless remains the infinity of other worlds with other changes and glitches occurring all at once. If the wisdom to be gained from passing through hell and space is the infinite of the void, the wisdom to be gained from the multiplicity of black cats is the rich infinity of being, existence and possibility.
Arriving at Joey Veltkamp’s February 2017 Vignettes exhibit, it was clear from the street looking into Rachel and John’s house that this show was dealing with the supernatural. Hanging in the front room window were sheer fabric panels with appliqué patches of heavily shadowed and made-up eyes announced the other-worldliness. Spirits are present and in many forms. A haunted space, like all indoor spaces at the end of winter, so charged with telekinetic and telepathic energy of its occupant(s). A haunted house, but in January (unlike October) we are familiar with ghosts, and in the January of this year the powers of naked death ascended to the leadership of the world.
Once inside and in the first room of the show there hangs, along with the sheer panels, a large black quilt. It is composed of spells and talismans, each smaller square housing a symbol of power and protection, an anchor point from which to journey into darkness. Skulls, crystals, pentagrams, the word “protect” in appliquéd ‘wood’ letters—homage to Gretchen Frances Bennett’s found stick word art.
Sharing the space with the eyes and the spell quilt were a pair of pillows placed on chairs, each with a broken heart emoji, invoking the kind and tragic power of Laura Palmer, another symbol of strength and resistance. It becomes clear that wherever the journey of these artworks is headed, grounding in power is necessary and some danger is present or lies ahead.
In the next room more sheer panels hang in the windows and more eyes look out from the gauzy material. Along with the eyed panels there was a table full of small ceramic ghosts painted up like the cosmos and sitting on small, round mirror disks, the infinity of their motif reflecting into infinity. There is little distinction in Joey’s work between outer space and the underworld – vacuum and death both infinite and un-survivable phenomenon.
Binding this second room with the first was a pair of flags and a new motif for Joey’s work – a black cat appears on the flags, almost identical to each other—the latter done by memory, on opposite faces of a wall, each with the phrase Déjà Vu appearing on it, the lettering the same but the colors slightly different and the cat figure in slightly different positions. This diptych is a direct reference to the movie The Matrix, where the repeated sighting of the same black cat as an experience of deja vu is revealed to be an indicator that there has been a significant change made to the fabric of the world of the matrix. Not only a personification of the phenomena of change, the cat is our familiar and our guide while traveling through the dimensions.
Also hanging with the eyes, the cats, and the cosmic ghosts is one of three quilts of its kind in the show. Multi-tonal, textured blacks patched together, the chorus of darkness interrupted with flashes of heat and light in the form of randomly sized triangles, trapezoids, parallelograms and rhombuses of color. Two more of these burning landscapes hang on the walls leading up the stairs to the final room of the show. Akin to the blending of the underworld with outer space depicted with the ceramic ghosts, the landscapes depicted in these three quilts is both of the fire of space and the fires of hell. Accompanied by the indifferent harbinger in the form of the black cat, we are walking with Joey through the cosmic underworld.
The final space of the show, past the watching eyes and glittering ghosts and burning voids, is the bedroom upstairs. The sole artwork in the room is a quilt lying on the bed. The cats again appear; this time en masse and in distinctly different poses, on the quilt upstairs, the resident housecat Brigitte having found a comfortable spot for itself on the bed as well.
But what are the lessons from hell and the vacuum, of walking through this heartbreak simulation? Joey’s work participates strongly in the realm of the pop culture oracular, pulling in and manipulating the signs of culture of the moment, playing in their subtleties and shifting them around before casting them back in to the infinite sign constellation in the form of fabric objects with meanings made from Joey’s particular alchemy of working with sadness and elementally reconfiguring it into joy.
But all oracles have limits to their vision into the ocean of possibilities. And it is the brave or unprotected oracles that, in the midst of confusion, go deeper, towards the leveling wisdom of infinity and death, and the freedom brought forth from acknowledging that wisdom. In the face of the cruel madness and absurdity so evident in our world at this time, the reminder of our death is a reminder of our life. In the face of the infinite void of space, we are able to refocus on ourselves with a grounded perspective.
But it is not all grim contemplations of death and freedom and endless emptiness, and the cats in their various poses on the final quilt in the show remind us of that. With each change or glitch in the fabric of our worlds, with each appearance of the cat as a harbinger of change, there nonetheless remains the infinity of other worlds with other changes and glitches occurring all at once. If the wisdom to be gained from passing through hell and space is the infinite of the void, the wisdom to be gained from the multiplicity of black cats is the rich infinity of being, existence and possibility.
The lifesaving qualities of Joey Veltkamp's large quilted work: Life is Beautiful
by Gretchen Bennett
Essay for Vignettes: In the Studio series, 2016
Life is Beautiful
Joey Veltkamp is exhibiting a new quilted work, Life Is Beautiful, at the Tacoma Art Museum. The quilt, constructed of stitched batting and fabric and around 11 feet square, is his largest to date, collecting 12 different song lyric fragments under the banner of Sufjan Stevens' lyric, We're All Gonna Die. Titled Life Is Beautiful, the work was created for the TAM for its exhibition, NW Art Now, running May 13 to September 4, 2016. Joey’s TAM entry, while acknowledging our mortality, is also hiding hopeful song lyrics, embedded pink on pink in the body of the quilt, asking us to hold on. This quilt could be lifesaving.
Joey describes his quilted work "as existing on the edge between hopeful and bleak, candy colored sadness. One side is comforting,” an expanse of pink; “and one side is real,” appliquéd with We Are All Gonna Die. The comfort is also real.
Maybe the making of the work brings clarity to the artist, as he uses soft materials to face harder realities. The avoidance of this labor would be understandable, but Joey has said that making the work is compulsory for him and it gives him relief.
An example of the two-sided nature of his work is Old Sun New Day, a quilt made in 2015 to commemorate a friend’s death. White text is stitched onto bright sunrise—and sunset—colors. An archived Arts West website entry describes Joey’s fabric work as having “themes of comfort, social and political affirmation; dealing in Northwest mythologies, feminism, gender identity, quilt history (The Gee’s Bend Quilt Makers), (art quilt history: Faith Ringgold), The Carpenters, and queer politics. Aphorisms like “A day without lesbians is like a day without sunshine” are meant to replace worry with comfort.”
Sun in your heart,
la vie en rose.
Thinkin’ ‘bout forever.
This speaks to the cycle of work and rest involved in the making of the work. “My quilts contain my love and my worry,” Joey says. He begins work in the studio each day around 7 a.m., after having breakfast with his partner, Ben, also an artist. “I love quilting - it's meditation. I make art every day.” Joey explains that a few years ago he began both a meditation and quilting practice and that one or both of these helped him in a dark time. He became a donor daddy (“Papa Bear!”) for dear friends who had a beautiful baby boy. He began meditating. He cut and sewed quilts. He met Ben. He had another baby with his friends. His at-home studio practice, like his process, blends creative outlet and homemaking to become incomprehensible and familiar together.
American singer/songwriter Sufjan Stevens describes his 2015 album, Carrie & Lowell as being inspired by the 2012 death of his mother, Carrie, and the family trips they took to Oregon during Stevens' childhood. Recording the album helped Stevens process her death. In an interview on the music blog Pitchfork, Stevens says "with this record, I needed to extract myself out of this environment of make-believe. It’s something that was necessary for me to do in the wake of my mother’s death—to pursue a sense of peace and serenity in spite of suffering. It’s not really trying to say anything new, or prove anything, or innovate. It feels artless, which is a good thing. This is not my art project; this is my life."
On Wikipedia, Stevens says about producer Thomas Bartlett, "Thomas took all these sketches and made sense of it all.” A patchwork. "I was recording songs as a means of grieving, making sense of it. But the writing and recording wasn’t the salve I expected. I fell deeper and deeper into doubt and misery. It was a year of real darkness. In the past my work had a real reciprocity of resources – I would put something in and get something from it. But not this time."
“I think a common thread in my work is the idea of not trying to create new exciting things," says Joey, but rather to create works that slow us down for everyday life moments, so that we can work through them. “That means invoking previously existing things (such as song lyrics) and putting disparate things together to create new and nuanced relationships.”
I feel better
floating in space.
Shine Bright.
For a 2014 quilt, Stardust / Helpless, Joey was inspired by Martin Scorsese's 1978 film, The Last Waltz. In the film, The Band and Neil Young sing a version of Helpless, with recording artist Joni Mitchell chiming in: ‘I feel so helpless; I can hear you now.’
In an email, Joey writes, “I have to reposition myself mentally to not cry when I hear her sing ‘I can hear you now.’ Mitchell wrote the song Woodstock, about the festival she missed due to her manager's advice to play Dick Cavett. The lyrics reference the poetic idea that we are made of stardust, which helps give comfort to the idea of death. In a recent (sewn fabric) flag, I made the A-side: We are Stardust and for part of the text, I used a kitten fabric. The kitten referenced a quilt I made for my friend Michelle, who was dying, and I used the remaining kitten fabric to make Lark (Joey’s daughter) one of her first dresses.” Joey bring this fabric back into life.
Crosby, Stills and Nash, who did attend Woodstock, covered Mitchell’s song, replaying their first-hand experience through her channeling of that experience. Mitchell’s understanding of Woodstock is like a dream, repeated.
We are stardust
Billion-year-old carbon We are golden
Caught in the devil's bargain And we've got to get ourselves
back to the garden
In her essay, On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry makes a case for how beauty saves us, by saving itself. She tells us that beauty brings copies of itself into being, as we repeat what we find beautiful. I easily apply this to the fabric fragments and song lyrics in Joey’s work. A song, for example, the generative object, the thing thought to be beautiful, through its donation of stray lyrics, continues to be present in the newly begotten object, the quilt. Someone, “who gave rise” to the song’s creation remains “present in the newborn object.”
“Beauty always takes place in the particular,” writes Scarry, “and if there are no particulars, the chances of seeing it go down. Proust, for example, says we make a mistake when we talk disparagingly or discouragingly about 'life’ because by using this general term, ‘life,’ we have already excluded before the fact all beauty and happiness, which take place only in the particular: we believed we were taking happiness and beauty into account, whereas in fact we left them out and replaced them by syntheses in which there is not a single atom of either.”
For Life Is a Beautiful, Joey used whatever pink fabric he could find, while remembering and looking for another particular pink. His work forms around certain bedsheets, a shirt, the chorus of a popular song, combining these, while not totally absorbing them.
I will always love you.
Life imitates art:
We are your friends.
Comedian Louis CK warns that “everything that makes you happy is going to end at some point, and nothing ends well.” Introducing a puppy into the family, for example, is just “a countdown to sorrow.” The puppy won’t last forever. Joey has restructured his life around his family. “I have spent my life keeping people at a distance, as a safety mechanism, so I learned that you either build a wall so you won't be hurt, which means you can't fully participate in relationships, or you leave when the stakes get high. I can't leave any of these people now and that creates anxiety. The fact that something could happen to any of us, that idea is present in a lot of my quilts.” At the same time, this fabric of family, as Stevens sings, may be the “only thing keeping me from driving this car, highlife, jack knife, into the canyon at night.”
Joey’s children like to have songs in their heads. His daughter will sing ‘row, row, row your boat’ for an hour. She likes loose fabric, pockets, small spaces. Elliptical lyrics form a space, where you can be for minutes at a time. She is singing ‘ gently down the stream,’ repeating the artist’s intention that his works create a transitional state, sleeping, “drifting towards or away from terra firma.”
Lark is complete, while her face presents a small version of Joey’s face. The object which resembles another object is still not that object; it remains apart. Joey, without precedent, remains “present in the newborn object,” Lark, also without precedent.
Scarry writes that when you encounter something, which seems to be entirely new to you, then it presents the world as new, presents a filter for seeing or understanding something newly. “It is the very way the beautiful thing fills the mind and breaks all frames that gives the ‘never before in the history of the world’ feeling.” Beauty saves.
“First, beauty is sacred.” “Second, beauty is unprecedented.” One believes that the loved or desired object has no precedent, and then they remember another like object that is reflective of the second beautiful thing, only to recall the first beautiful object also has no precedent.
“The first and second attributes of beauty are very close to one another, for to say that something is “sacred” is also to say either “it has no precedent” or “it has as its only precedent that which is itself unprecedented. But there is also a third feature: beauty is lifesaving, a plank amid the waves of the sea.”
Joey’s soft works re-create “the structure of a perception that occurs whenever one sees something beautiful; it is as though one has suddenly been washed up onto a merciful beach: all unease, aggression, indifference suddenly drop back behind one, like a surf that has for a moment lost its capacity to harm. Beauty.” Take a rest in stolen lyrics, reconfigured into this “hymn to beauty.”
The hymn of Lark may be “called a palinode to the beauty of” her father. Just as Joey’s sewn works work their borrowed fragments away from but are still part of the larger pieces they are cut from.
What is it to be in error, to fail to see the worth and beauty of the object presented? You can change your mind, and that’s beautiful. You find yourself falling; you are on the plank and suddenly caught. For now, you have made it back to the garden.
don’t you look up to me,
be even better than me
The quilts open up and hold. Joey says his goal is to “preload or embed,” to create a bond between this work and the viewer, and to bring to this space between the two, pleasure, an open embrace and rest. A lay-down with scraps and songs.
How To Disappear Completely 2015 is a work that draws from a Radiohead lyric, “which felt like they were referencing suicide," Joey says, "I started humming the song and then realized that I was depressed. I didn't always realize it before, but it kind of crystallized, and I became aware that I have an ongoing internal soundtrack that matches my emotional state. And I didn't know I was so sad until that song popped into my head. And then it stayed with me until I made the flag and released it.”
He first began drawing quilts. “I was obsessed” with making these drawings, “as soon as I recognized it was a release.” He tells me that maybe “the act of creation is traumatic. And that all beauty is connected to pain.” Maybe the pain he refers to is what labors. And the beauty is the transfiguration of the commonplace, the ordinary thing, a blanket, into art.
Parts of Life Is Beautiful are given a special power of narration, like a story being told by different people (different songs), from different points of view. In his essay, Rembrandt and the Body, English writer John Berger writing about Rembrandt’s paintings, says that “these points of view can only exist in a corporeal space which is incompatible with territorial or architectural space. Corporeal space is continually changing its measures by waves, not meters. Hence, its necessary dislocation of ‘real space.’”
Rembrandt’s self-portraits, says Berger, hint at the fact that “he grew old in a climate of economic fanaticism and indifference–not dissimilar to the climate of the period we are living through. The human was no longer self-evident; it had to be found in the darkness. Painting–particularly in the second half of his life–was a search for an exit from the darkness.”
Rembrandt does not readily hold out his search for the body for us, he gives it to us in pieces. “Baroque art, (which Rembrandt profited from), loved foreshortenings and improbable juxtapositions.” Patched quilt bodies collapse experience, information and popular cultural glimpses. They are “furtive.”
It may happen with each viewer who stands in front of Life Is Beautiful, to keep borrowing from Berger, that “before his art, the spectator’s body remembers its own inner experience.” This soft work is outstretched arms, occupying a “supreme and central position.” In the “fusion between two bodies not only desire can pass but also pardon or faith.” The quilting shows itself to be a process of dissecting the body to realign it with another body, ultimately.
Bigger than religion:
I slay all day.
Let the sun shine in.
At first, the particular truth of Life Is Beautiful can be missed. Large and pink and placed in the common space of the art gallery help us to see it, while masking the truth of the embrace it provides. Old clothes and new words continue to proliferate in fragments, as evidence of daily life, finding their way onto Joey’s sewn works, each one a raft of rescued scraps with the promise of rest, life.
Thoughts of comfort, self-care, the consideration of others, and unprecedented pink fabric culture are the artist’s points of contemplation for making remedies to isolation and despair. Don’t forget, the pink calls, what Arthur Danto refers to as “the world as everyone lives in it, the world of dailiness, the world of common experience, the dear, predictable world anyone longs for.” This everyday saves, as we cobble together our undercover sleep, our songs, our pockets of darkness.
Looking up the published lyrics for Stevens’ song, Fourth of July reveals that the end line is transcribed as we’re all gonna die (X7). Life Is Beautiful presents private moments and small matters sewn up for larger public view, including family sheets and friends’ T-shirts. Rest here and, yes, rehearse. “I practice a form of pre-grieving when I address death in the work. This is a kind of preparation.” This can be read as empathy, which the blanket at TAM gives shape to, as it also gives shape to a myriad of individual unparsed feelings begetting more feelings (X7).
I'm no longer afraid to die Cause that is all that I have left Yes! Yes!
And I'm no longer afraid to dance tonight Cause that is all that I have left Yes! Yes!
Life is Beautiful
Joey Veltkamp is exhibiting a new quilted work, Life Is Beautiful, at the Tacoma Art Museum. The quilt, constructed of stitched batting and fabric and around 11 feet square, is his largest to date, collecting 12 different song lyric fragments under the banner of Sufjan Stevens' lyric, We're All Gonna Die. Titled Life Is Beautiful, the work was created for the TAM for its exhibition, NW Art Now, running May 13 to September 4, 2016. Joey’s TAM entry, while acknowledging our mortality, is also hiding hopeful song lyrics, embedded pink on pink in the body of the quilt, asking us to hold on. This quilt could be lifesaving.
Joey describes his quilted work "as existing on the edge between hopeful and bleak, candy colored sadness. One side is comforting,” an expanse of pink; “and one side is real,” appliquéd with We Are All Gonna Die. The comfort is also real.
Maybe the making of the work brings clarity to the artist, as he uses soft materials to face harder realities. The avoidance of this labor would be understandable, but Joey has said that making the work is compulsory for him and it gives him relief.
An example of the two-sided nature of his work is Old Sun New Day, a quilt made in 2015 to commemorate a friend’s death. White text is stitched onto bright sunrise—and sunset—colors. An archived Arts West website entry describes Joey’s fabric work as having “themes of comfort, social and political affirmation; dealing in Northwest mythologies, feminism, gender identity, quilt history (The Gee’s Bend Quilt Makers), (art quilt history: Faith Ringgold), The Carpenters, and queer politics. Aphorisms like “A day without lesbians is like a day without sunshine” are meant to replace worry with comfort.”
Sun in your heart,
la vie en rose.
Thinkin’ ‘bout forever.
This speaks to the cycle of work and rest involved in the making of the work. “My quilts contain my love and my worry,” Joey says. He begins work in the studio each day around 7 a.m., after having breakfast with his partner, Ben, also an artist. “I love quilting - it's meditation. I make art every day.” Joey explains that a few years ago he began both a meditation and quilting practice and that one or both of these helped him in a dark time. He became a donor daddy (“Papa Bear!”) for dear friends who had a beautiful baby boy. He began meditating. He cut and sewed quilts. He met Ben. He had another baby with his friends. His at-home studio practice, like his process, blends creative outlet and homemaking to become incomprehensible and familiar together.
American singer/songwriter Sufjan Stevens describes his 2015 album, Carrie & Lowell as being inspired by the 2012 death of his mother, Carrie, and the family trips they took to Oregon during Stevens' childhood. Recording the album helped Stevens process her death. In an interview on the music blog Pitchfork, Stevens says "with this record, I needed to extract myself out of this environment of make-believe. It’s something that was necessary for me to do in the wake of my mother’s death—to pursue a sense of peace and serenity in spite of suffering. It’s not really trying to say anything new, or prove anything, or innovate. It feels artless, which is a good thing. This is not my art project; this is my life."
On Wikipedia, Stevens says about producer Thomas Bartlett, "Thomas took all these sketches and made sense of it all.” A patchwork. "I was recording songs as a means of grieving, making sense of it. But the writing and recording wasn’t the salve I expected. I fell deeper and deeper into doubt and misery. It was a year of real darkness. In the past my work had a real reciprocity of resources – I would put something in and get something from it. But not this time."
“I think a common thread in my work is the idea of not trying to create new exciting things," says Joey, but rather to create works that slow us down for everyday life moments, so that we can work through them. “That means invoking previously existing things (such as song lyrics) and putting disparate things together to create new and nuanced relationships.”
I feel better
floating in space.
Shine Bright.
For a 2014 quilt, Stardust / Helpless, Joey was inspired by Martin Scorsese's 1978 film, The Last Waltz. In the film, The Band and Neil Young sing a version of Helpless, with recording artist Joni Mitchell chiming in: ‘I feel so helpless; I can hear you now.’
In an email, Joey writes, “I have to reposition myself mentally to not cry when I hear her sing ‘I can hear you now.’ Mitchell wrote the song Woodstock, about the festival she missed due to her manager's advice to play Dick Cavett. The lyrics reference the poetic idea that we are made of stardust, which helps give comfort to the idea of death. In a recent (sewn fabric) flag, I made the A-side: We are Stardust and for part of the text, I used a kitten fabric. The kitten referenced a quilt I made for my friend Michelle, who was dying, and I used the remaining kitten fabric to make Lark (Joey’s daughter) one of her first dresses.” Joey bring this fabric back into life.
Crosby, Stills and Nash, who did attend Woodstock, covered Mitchell’s song, replaying their first-hand experience through her channeling of that experience. Mitchell’s understanding of Woodstock is like a dream, repeated.
We are stardust
Billion-year-old carbon We are golden
Caught in the devil's bargain And we've got to get ourselves
back to the garden
In her essay, On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry makes a case for how beauty saves us, by saving itself. She tells us that beauty brings copies of itself into being, as we repeat what we find beautiful. I easily apply this to the fabric fragments and song lyrics in Joey’s work. A song, for example, the generative object, the thing thought to be beautiful, through its donation of stray lyrics, continues to be present in the newly begotten object, the quilt. Someone, “who gave rise” to the song’s creation remains “present in the newborn object.”
“Beauty always takes place in the particular,” writes Scarry, “and if there are no particulars, the chances of seeing it go down. Proust, for example, says we make a mistake when we talk disparagingly or discouragingly about 'life’ because by using this general term, ‘life,’ we have already excluded before the fact all beauty and happiness, which take place only in the particular: we believed we were taking happiness and beauty into account, whereas in fact we left them out and replaced them by syntheses in which there is not a single atom of either.”
For Life Is a Beautiful, Joey used whatever pink fabric he could find, while remembering and looking for another particular pink. His work forms around certain bedsheets, a shirt, the chorus of a popular song, combining these, while not totally absorbing them.
I will always love you.
Life imitates art:
We are your friends.
Comedian Louis CK warns that “everything that makes you happy is going to end at some point, and nothing ends well.” Introducing a puppy into the family, for example, is just “a countdown to sorrow.” The puppy won’t last forever. Joey has restructured his life around his family. “I have spent my life keeping people at a distance, as a safety mechanism, so I learned that you either build a wall so you won't be hurt, which means you can't fully participate in relationships, or you leave when the stakes get high. I can't leave any of these people now and that creates anxiety. The fact that something could happen to any of us, that idea is present in a lot of my quilts.” At the same time, this fabric of family, as Stevens sings, may be the “only thing keeping me from driving this car, highlife, jack knife, into the canyon at night.”
Joey’s children like to have songs in their heads. His daughter will sing ‘row, row, row your boat’ for an hour. She likes loose fabric, pockets, small spaces. Elliptical lyrics form a space, where you can be for minutes at a time. She is singing ‘ gently down the stream,’ repeating the artist’s intention that his works create a transitional state, sleeping, “drifting towards or away from terra firma.”
Lark is complete, while her face presents a small version of Joey’s face. The object which resembles another object is still not that object; it remains apart. Joey, without precedent, remains “present in the newborn object,” Lark, also without precedent.
Scarry writes that when you encounter something, which seems to be entirely new to you, then it presents the world as new, presents a filter for seeing or understanding something newly. “It is the very way the beautiful thing fills the mind and breaks all frames that gives the ‘never before in the history of the world’ feeling.” Beauty saves.
“First, beauty is sacred.” “Second, beauty is unprecedented.” One believes that the loved or desired object has no precedent, and then they remember another like object that is reflective of the second beautiful thing, only to recall the first beautiful object also has no precedent.
“The first and second attributes of beauty are very close to one another, for to say that something is “sacred” is also to say either “it has no precedent” or “it has as its only precedent that which is itself unprecedented. But there is also a third feature: beauty is lifesaving, a plank amid the waves of the sea.”
Joey’s soft works re-create “the structure of a perception that occurs whenever one sees something beautiful; it is as though one has suddenly been washed up onto a merciful beach: all unease, aggression, indifference suddenly drop back behind one, like a surf that has for a moment lost its capacity to harm. Beauty.” Take a rest in stolen lyrics, reconfigured into this “hymn to beauty.”
The hymn of Lark may be “called a palinode to the beauty of” her father. Just as Joey’s sewn works work their borrowed fragments away from but are still part of the larger pieces they are cut from.
What is it to be in error, to fail to see the worth and beauty of the object presented? You can change your mind, and that’s beautiful. You find yourself falling; you are on the plank and suddenly caught. For now, you have made it back to the garden.
don’t you look up to me,
be even better than me
The quilts open up and hold. Joey says his goal is to “preload or embed,” to create a bond between this work and the viewer, and to bring to this space between the two, pleasure, an open embrace and rest. A lay-down with scraps and songs.
How To Disappear Completely 2015 is a work that draws from a Radiohead lyric, “which felt like they were referencing suicide," Joey says, "I started humming the song and then realized that I was depressed. I didn't always realize it before, but it kind of crystallized, and I became aware that I have an ongoing internal soundtrack that matches my emotional state. And I didn't know I was so sad until that song popped into my head. And then it stayed with me until I made the flag and released it.”
He first began drawing quilts. “I was obsessed” with making these drawings, “as soon as I recognized it was a release.” He tells me that maybe “the act of creation is traumatic. And that all beauty is connected to pain.” Maybe the pain he refers to is what labors. And the beauty is the transfiguration of the commonplace, the ordinary thing, a blanket, into art.
Parts of Life Is Beautiful are given a special power of narration, like a story being told by different people (different songs), from different points of view. In his essay, Rembrandt and the Body, English writer John Berger writing about Rembrandt’s paintings, says that “these points of view can only exist in a corporeal space which is incompatible with territorial or architectural space. Corporeal space is continually changing its measures by waves, not meters. Hence, its necessary dislocation of ‘real space.’”
Rembrandt’s self-portraits, says Berger, hint at the fact that “he grew old in a climate of economic fanaticism and indifference–not dissimilar to the climate of the period we are living through. The human was no longer self-evident; it had to be found in the darkness. Painting–particularly in the second half of his life–was a search for an exit from the darkness.”
Rembrandt does not readily hold out his search for the body for us, he gives it to us in pieces. “Baroque art, (which Rembrandt profited from), loved foreshortenings and improbable juxtapositions.” Patched quilt bodies collapse experience, information and popular cultural glimpses. They are “furtive.”
It may happen with each viewer who stands in front of Life Is Beautiful, to keep borrowing from Berger, that “before his art, the spectator’s body remembers its own inner experience.” This soft work is outstretched arms, occupying a “supreme and central position.” In the “fusion between two bodies not only desire can pass but also pardon or faith.” The quilting shows itself to be a process of dissecting the body to realign it with another body, ultimately.
Bigger than religion:
I slay all day.
Let the sun shine in.
At first, the particular truth of Life Is Beautiful can be missed. Large and pink and placed in the common space of the art gallery help us to see it, while masking the truth of the embrace it provides. Old clothes and new words continue to proliferate in fragments, as evidence of daily life, finding their way onto Joey’s sewn works, each one a raft of rescued scraps with the promise of rest, life.
Thoughts of comfort, self-care, the consideration of others, and unprecedented pink fabric culture are the artist’s points of contemplation for making remedies to isolation and despair. Don’t forget, the pink calls, what Arthur Danto refers to as “the world as everyone lives in it, the world of dailiness, the world of common experience, the dear, predictable world anyone longs for.” This everyday saves, as we cobble together our undercover sleep, our songs, our pockets of darkness.
Looking up the published lyrics for Stevens’ song, Fourth of July reveals that the end line is transcribed as we’re all gonna die (X7). Life Is Beautiful presents private moments and small matters sewn up for larger public view, including family sheets and friends’ T-shirts. Rest here and, yes, rehearse. “I practice a form of pre-grieving when I address death in the work. This is a kind of preparation.” This can be read as empathy, which the blanket at TAM gives shape to, as it also gives shape to a myriad of individual unparsed feelings begetting more feelings (X7).
I'm no longer afraid to die Cause that is all that I have left Yes! Yes!
And I'm no longer afraid to dance tonight Cause that is all that I have left Yes! Yes!
This is For Love Letters by Sharon Arnold
Essay for ArtsWest, This is not a protest! It's a Celebration!, 2015
Joey Veltkamp is unfolding one of the largest quilts I’ve seen him make, meant to envelop not just one body but two. The largest patches are made from a friend’s red plaid lumberjack flannel; one pocket prominently, lovingly, placed near the top of the blanket. “... this is for love letters,” Joey explains as he pats the pocket and flattens out the quilt. I nearly die from the sweetness, the sincerity of the remark, and absolute romance of the thought that a quilt could be made to contain such a thing.
It fits to hear those words come from Joey’s lips. After all, his entire body of work is a love letter. Even when the work is about mundane objects, Veltkamp is reaching out from the heart to express something tangible about the emotions we’re feeling. In the truest sense, he is drawing from a long history of art made from love and nurture, creating objects with beauty and meaning as well as function and memory.
In 1987, a group of friends wanted to honor the multitude of deaths that AIDS had wreaked upon the gay community. Their response was to create a quilt memorializing the names of people who had died, and is known as The AIDS Memorial Quilt, founded by The NAMES Project Foundation. Born out of anguish, the NAMES Project has served as a monument to the catastrophic effect the disease had not only on an entire culture, but on individual lives. This project points at those lives and humanizes them. These were people, not numbers or statistics. The immediate personal impact of the disease was devastating to an entire culture. Through the act of sewing – a form of mending - and naming, the AIDS Memorial Quilt became an act of healing.
The spectre of the Memorial Quilt is real. Its purpose was to commemorate the ghosts of people we remember and heal those who remain. In 2011, Joey Veltkamp exhibited a collection of colorful, pinched clay ghost sculptures at SOIL Gallery in Seattle to document his own journey through sadness. Sweet, simple, and playful, they were small protagonists in a story about grief without a name or a place. They served as symbols of people – friends, old celebrities, fictional characters – but over time they became friendly, warm, and comforting fixtures. It is from these that a new body of work emerged, a series of drawings Veltkamp made based on the shape, color, and repetition of form inspired by piles of blankets. Like ghosts, blankets are imbued with the presence of a person. Unlike ghosts, they don’t hold the shape of the person beneath them. Still, they are altered by our interaction, carrying our scent when we’re gone. Blankets and quilts hold us when others can’t. They keep us warm. Soft, cozy, and sometimes fluffy; they are in the truest sense of the word, “comforters”.
It would be easy to assume that “craft” seems to take the pressure off an artist. Quilts don’t carry the weight of Western art history. They do carry the extensive history of craft-making, nurture, caretaking, and the art of women across cultures and across time. Perhaps the most famous among them are the startlingly Abstract Expressionist quilts made by the Women of Gee’s Bend. The work of these women from Alabama can be seen across modern art museums and galleries all over the US, something I’m certain those making them never imagined would happen. And why would anyone imagine it to happen? Textile arts are passed on through generations of women, and made intimately in small gatherings. Though they are not made for exhibition, they are a document of a culture. Quilts are a recording of moments in time. They are a portrait of the person for whom they are made. But the people making them remain invisible.
Quilt-making has long been relegated to the work of women confined to the home, who were expected to take care of their men and children and to some extent, each other. Historically, while men’s work is expressly tied to the notion of identity and recognition, women have laboured without any expectation of it. In these traditional heteronormative roles, men are celebrated for their work, and women are only noticed when it isn’t done. So what does it mean when a man takes on the work that is traditionally assigned to women? What about a gay man who is aligning himself with women? The question becomes one about narrative, who is describing it, and how it’s being told.
When a gay man takes on the feminine language and acts of women, he is not standing in place of her. Rather, he is standing alongside her. While he still benefits from his status as a male, he is also demoted – being feminine, or like a woman, is not of value to the privileged few in Western society. To say one is “like a girl” is to say they are weak, inferior, or less than. If the worst insult one man can hurl towards another is to identify him as “female”, then the gay male holds an identity as one who is male, but who like women, receives men; and who is then placed between. He can speak neither for men, nor for women. He has his own story of hardship, acceptance, gender roles, and identity.
Joey Veltkamp is creating a series of quilts and flags where color forms stories of identity through symbolism. Common themes of alienation or weirdness emerge, for example, in the way he uses neon, giving us a visual clue that there is something happening or about to happen. This use of color is a marker of uncanny Pacific Northwest energy, a sign of something strange or supernatural. Veltkamp loves to touch on the bizarre nature and mythology of this rainy, dark, and mystical region - our penchant for vampires, serial killers, and long dark winters creates a sort of Norse-like feeling of weirdness and the supernatural. The Northwest, a historically transient location in the furthermost corner of the lower 48 States, is a home to misfits, weirdos, and outcasts.
Veltkamp often points to these cultural references or people in his flags. Through them, he celebrates feminist, queer, and minority remembrances or slogans. “A Day Without Lesbians Is Like A Day Without Sunshine”, or pulls an uncanny quote from a Nirvana song that evokes the scratchy voice of Kurt Cobain screaming “No Recess”. Or they cite a ballad of strength such Alicia Keys’ “That Girl is On Fire”. Each of these embody a duality which reflects the history of the music they reference. Like old 45s, the flags have “A sides” and “B sides”, often containing two different texts or an image and a text that correspond with one another.
The flags feel celebratory but they are also a call to attention. They are evocative of banners carried by activists during a march, containing short but memorable words to carry home and not forget. But rather than protest, they serve as an homage to the heroes in his life, people who are in his words folks who create space. And in fact, while Veltkamp isn’t ordinarily identified as an activist artist, he has a history of doing just such a thing in his artistic practice: he creates space. Whether that’s been through his blog ‘Best Of’, using his studio residency at Seattle University for a series of workshops taught by artists in the Seattle community, or creating the Seattle Women’s Convention at the Hedreen Gallery (again, at Seattle University); this is precisely what Joey’s activism looks like. He clears the stage for others to speak, or just be.
It would be easy to describe Veltkamp’s work as pop art, not only because of its references but because of its colorful iconography. But playing with both subject matter and object-ness, Veltkamp’s works describe a lineage that traces back to the work of Jasper Johns - a gay male artist (his lover was Robert Rauschenberg) who treated the duality of his works with a distinct philosophy that they could be all things at once, both subject and object; formal composition and material. He defied the macho-ism of his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries, whose work was more like a stamp of their personality, and instead pursued conveying symbols outside of their meaning. Johns’ best examples of painting as object, separate from symbol, are his series of flag paintings or targets. Both toyed with our attachment to the symbol while declaring their presence as formal constructions. The game is in our attention to the symbol, as well as its life as an independent work of art. Johns once said:
Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither. At every point in nature there is something to see. My work contains similar possibilities for the changing focus of the eye.
This points back to Veltkamp’s still lifes (the diary drawings) and his blanket series, which are collections of things demanding to be viewed out of context as a collection of marks on paper. He draws them because he sees them; he sees them, therefore he draws them.
The transition from soft quilts into draughtsmanship formalizes them. They recall Veltkamp’s diary drawings which described his life and the lives of those he knew, giving weight and meaning to mundanity, a pile we might not otherwise give attention to. He has given composition to the clutter, and order to chaos. These objects alone have no significance, but when portrayed together they tell a compelling story, if not a biography. In much the same way, blankets are blankets until viewed through another lens. What is ordinary changes simply because we are looking. And when we are looking, we begin to see the many different sides of a thing, and what that thing can be.
Jasper Johns spoke frequently to the duality in his work. He said:
I made the flags and targets to open men’s eyes … (they) were both things - which are seen and not looked at - examined.
We expect artists to exist in a dynamic, rather than a static state. We expect them to respond to their environment and a constant stream of input and information. While some collectors or critics might fear a lack of consistency in the work, the continuity actually lies within the artist’s underlying philosophy. The artist him/her/self is the binding thread. Therefore consistency is an inevitability. Artists must allow themselves duality and contradiction - I am this, I am not this, I am these things. It speaks to their unspeakable compulsion to make things, whatever those things may be, whether tangible, idea-based versus object-based, curatorial, and so on.
True to the content of love letters, Joey Veltkamp’s duality is sweet, nostalgic, and celebratory. Like a rush of blood to the head we are dizzy with color, joy, and happiness. Of course there is context, meaning, and a story Veltkamp wants to tell us, but he doesn’t tell it for us. His view is only a window into a world he is willing to share and we are allowed to move through it and place ourselves within it. He has created a space for us.
The best art lives and moves with us, wherever we go. We carry it, like a pocket full of love letters.
Joey Veltkamp is unfolding one of the largest quilts I’ve seen him make, meant to envelop not just one body but two. The largest patches are made from a friend’s red plaid lumberjack flannel; one pocket prominently, lovingly, placed near the top of the blanket. “... this is for love letters,” Joey explains as he pats the pocket and flattens out the quilt. I nearly die from the sweetness, the sincerity of the remark, and absolute romance of the thought that a quilt could be made to contain such a thing.
It fits to hear those words come from Joey’s lips. After all, his entire body of work is a love letter. Even when the work is about mundane objects, Veltkamp is reaching out from the heart to express something tangible about the emotions we’re feeling. In the truest sense, he is drawing from a long history of art made from love and nurture, creating objects with beauty and meaning as well as function and memory.
In 1987, a group of friends wanted to honor the multitude of deaths that AIDS had wreaked upon the gay community. Their response was to create a quilt memorializing the names of people who had died, and is known as The AIDS Memorial Quilt, founded by The NAMES Project Foundation. Born out of anguish, the NAMES Project has served as a monument to the catastrophic effect the disease had not only on an entire culture, but on individual lives. This project points at those lives and humanizes them. These were people, not numbers or statistics. The immediate personal impact of the disease was devastating to an entire culture. Through the act of sewing – a form of mending - and naming, the AIDS Memorial Quilt became an act of healing.
The spectre of the Memorial Quilt is real. Its purpose was to commemorate the ghosts of people we remember and heal those who remain. In 2011, Joey Veltkamp exhibited a collection of colorful, pinched clay ghost sculptures at SOIL Gallery in Seattle to document his own journey through sadness. Sweet, simple, and playful, they were small protagonists in a story about grief without a name or a place. They served as symbols of people – friends, old celebrities, fictional characters – but over time they became friendly, warm, and comforting fixtures. It is from these that a new body of work emerged, a series of drawings Veltkamp made based on the shape, color, and repetition of form inspired by piles of blankets. Like ghosts, blankets are imbued with the presence of a person. Unlike ghosts, they don’t hold the shape of the person beneath them. Still, they are altered by our interaction, carrying our scent when we’re gone. Blankets and quilts hold us when others can’t. They keep us warm. Soft, cozy, and sometimes fluffy; they are in the truest sense of the word, “comforters”.
It would be easy to assume that “craft” seems to take the pressure off an artist. Quilts don’t carry the weight of Western art history. They do carry the extensive history of craft-making, nurture, caretaking, and the art of women across cultures and across time. Perhaps the most famous among them are the startlingly Abstract Expressionist quilts made by the Women of Gee’s Bend. The work of these women from Alabama can be seen across modern art museums and galleries all over the US, something I’m certain those making them never imagined would happen. And why would anyone imagine it to happen? Textile arts are passed on through generations of women, and made intimately in small gatherings. Though they are not made for exhibition, they are a document of a culture. Quilts are a recording of moments in time. They are a portrait of the person for whom they are made. But the people making them remain invisible.
Quilt-making has long been relegated to the work of women confined to the home, who were expected to take care of their men and children and to some extent, each other. Historically, while men’s work is expressly tied to the notion of identity and recognition, women have laboured without any expectation of it. In these traditional heteronormative roles, men are celebrated for their work, and women are only noticed when it isn’t done. So what does it mean when a man takes on the work that is traditionally assigned to women? What about a gay man who is aligning himself with women? The question becomes one about narrative, who is describing it, and how it’s being told.
When a gay man takes on the feminine language and acts of women, he is not standing in place of her. Rather, he is standing alongside her. While he still benefits from his status as a male, he is also demoted – being feminine, or like a woman, is not of value to the privileged few in Western society. To say one is “like a girl” is to say they are weak, inferior, or less than. If the worst insult one man can hurl towards another is to identify him as “female”, then the gay male holds an identity as one who is male, but who like women, receives men; and who is then placed between. He can speak neither for men, nor for women. He has his own story of hardship, acceptance, gender roles, and identity.
Joey Veltkamp is creating a series of quilts and flags where color forms stories of identity through symbolism. Common themes of alienation or weirdness emerge, for example, in the way he uses neon, giving us a visual clue that there is something happening or about to happen. This use of color is a marker of uncanny Pacific Northwest energy, a sign of something strange or supernatural. Veltkamp loves to touch on the bizarre nature and mythology of this rainy, dark, and mystical region - our penchant for vampires, serial killers, and long dark winters creates a sort of Norse-like feeling of weirdness and the supernatural. The Northwest, a historically transient location in the furthermost corner of the lower 48 States, is a home to misfits, weirdos, and outcasts.
Veltkamp often points to these cultural references or people in his flags. Through them, he celebrates feminist, queer, and minority remembrances or slogans. “A Day Without Lesbians Is Like A Day Without Sunshine”, or pulls an uncanny quote from a Nirvana song that evokes the scratchy voice of Kurt Cobain screaming “No Recess”. Or they cite a ballad of strength such Alicia Keys’ “That Girl is On Fire”. Each of these embody a duality which reflects the history of the music they reference. Like old 45s, the flags have “A sides” and “B sides”, often containing two different texts or an image and a text that correspond with one another.
The flags feel celebratory but they are also a call to attention. They are evocative of banners carried by activists during a march, containing short but memorable words to carry home and not forget. But rather than protest, they serve as an homage to the heroes in his life, people who are in his words folks who create space. And in fact, while Veltkamp isn’t ordinarily identified as an activist artist, he has a history of doing just such a thing in his artistic practice: he creates space. Whether that’s been through his blog ‘Best Of’, using his studio residency at Seattle University for a series of workshops taught by artists in the Seattle community, or creating the Seattle Women’s Convention at the Hedreen Gallery (again, at Seattle University); this is precisely what Joey’s activism looks like. He clears the stage for others to speak, or just be.
It would be easy to describe Veltkamp’s work as pop art, not only because of its references but because of its colorful iconography. But playing with both subject matter and object-ness, Veltkamp’s works describe a lineage that traces back to the work of Jasper Johns - a gay male artist (his lover was Robert Rauschenberg) who treated the duality of his works with a distinct philosophy that they could be all things at once, both subject and object; formal composition and material. He defied the macho-ism of his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries, whose work was more like a stamp of their personality, and instead pursued conveying symbols outside of their meaning. Johns’ best examples of painting as object, separate from symbol, are his series of flag paintings or targets. Both toyed with our attachment to the symbol while declaring their presence as formal constructions. The game is in our attention to the symbol, as well as its life as an independent work of art. Johns once said:
Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither. At every point in nature there is something to see. My work contains similar possibilities for the changing focus of the eye.
This points back to Veltkamp’s still lifes (the diary drawings) and his blanket series, which are collections of things demanding to be viewed out of context as a collection of marks on paper. He draws them because he sees them; he sees them, therefore he draws them.
The transition from soft quilts into draughtsmanship formalizes them. They recall Veltkamp’s diary drawings which described his life and the lives of those he knew, giving weight and meaning to mundanity, a pile we might not otherwise give attention to. He has given composition to the clutter, and order to chaos. These objects alone have no significance, but when portrayed together they tell a compelling story, if not a biography. In much the same way, blankets are blankets until viewed through another lens. What is ordinary changes simply because we are looking. And when we are looking, we begin to see the many different sides of a thing, and what that thing can be.
Jasper Johns spoke frequently to the duality in his work. He said:
I made the flags and targets to open men’s eyes … (they) were both things - which are seen and not looked at - examined.
We expect artists to exist in a dynamic, rather than a static state. We expect them to respond to their environment and a constant stream of input and information. While some collectors or critics might fear a lack of consistency in the work, the continuity actually lies within the artist’s underlying philosophy. The artist him/her/self is the binding thread. Therefore consistency is an inevitability. Artists must allow themselves duality and contradiction - I am this, I am not this, I am these things. It speaks to their unspeakable compulsion to make things, whatever those things may be, whether tangible, idea-based versus object-based, curatorial, and so on.
True to the content of love letters, Joey Veltkamp’s duality is sweet, nostalgic, and celebratory. Like a rush of blood to the head we are dizzy with color, joy, and happiness. Of course there is context, meaning, and a story Veltkamp wants to tell us, but he doesn’t tell it for us. His view is only a window into a world he is willing to share and we are allowed to move through it and place ourselves within it. He has created a space for us.
The best art lives and moves with us, wherever we go. We carry it, like a pocket full of love letters.
The Rainbow Connection by Amanda Manitach
Essay for NEPO House, The Rainbow Connection, 2012
Joey Veltkamp’s body of work has been steadily evolving since he bought his first paints twelve years ago. His practice has increasingly involved toying with the alchemical marriage of meaning and material, but one characteristic of his work has remained constant throughout: that through it he manifests a seductively personal yet nuanced symbolic language, one that emerges gradually from the methodical mythologizing of cultural clichés and everyday objects. His engagement with the banal and trivial is especially prominent in much of his work of the past two years, notably in the prolificacy of diary drawings that demonstrate a need to map his domestic surroundings, cataloguing commonplace objects with such persistence and fixation that they take on an aura of the familiar and the mystical. These pieces read like snapshots, like mechanically-rendered dissections of a fleeting moment. Their style is almost always flat and neatly matter-of-fact - which is not to say they don't convey a touch of the humorous, somber, or perverse at times, but neither do they set out to be overtly expressive or political. Instead there’s a sense of ordering and patient recording, a studied pursuit of imagined taxonomies. The same stylistic and expressive reserve also exists in the iconographic animals that recur in Veltkamp's drawings and paintings, creatures which, considered altogether, comprise a bestiary laden with symbolic meaning that can be read as simultaneously personal and heavily appropriative. While more inherently political than the diary drawings (one can't help but form connections amid a constellation of animals identified with gay, hipster, and American west culture) they are still marked with the stylistic restraint and formalism of an icon painting.
This flatness is abandoned in Veltkamp's recent oil paintings. Suddenly there's a momentum toward material sensuality and autobiographical candor that injects the bestiary with visceral technicolor. Flatness gives way to a deluge of medium applied directly and energetically to the canvas in streaking, clumping, running thickness. In these rainbow-slicked paintings he's worked and re-worked (and decadently over-worked) the surfaces, scraping off colors, re-applying them again impulsively, obfuscating and erasing whole sections of canvas with semi-opaque scrims of black, watery paint drawn like a veil across illegible ghost-images. Staid iconography has given way to something darkly rich, vulnerable, and virile.
Work this liquid and messy and emphatically saturated in its own materiality speaks a language of corporeality, sexuality, transubstantiation. Liquid states are indeterminate states, communicable, malleable, hybrid, and these paintings exist in that province of partial meanings - of articulate but unfinished phrases that open up on vast lacunae of often-unspeakable or paradoxical things.
In the past Veltkamp has used the symbolic language of animals as a way to bridge the gap of the uncommunicable or unspeakable. Animals are often used to indicate aggressively protective spirits, totems, or mystical incarnations of the artist's identity and selfhood. (Growing up in rural Montana, small black bears trespassing alone across the family property weren't uncommon; the identification isn't a casual affectation.) Bears, owls, horses, deer, foxes, etc, can be symbols of self-sufficiency, invulnerability to human interference, and regeneration. Anthropomorphizing animals like this and imbuing them with mystical characteristics in an unapologetically nostalgic way risks coming off kitschy or didactic, but in the case of Veltkamp's work - and especially apparent in his oil paintings - nostalgia for a state of animal innocence and incorruptibility only reinforces the reality of a cruel, dystopian world. Naivety doesn't factor into any of the work. Rather, coupled with the fantasy of the animal kingdom is the recognition of vulnerability in the wilderness, violence, and the threat of abandonment. It can sometimes be read as downright melancholy, but in Veltkamp's practice melancholy and joy are intertwined. The dystopian always carries with it the possibility of transfiguration: sadness is a void from which an excess of hope and unrestrained desire erupts.
There is a suggestion of this transformative power in almost all his imagery and it is hinted at through a continual play of contrasting emotion, double meanings, repetitions, playful folding, and animal-spirit doppelgängers. It's perhaps most conspicuous when Christian and gay iconography overlap, contradicting or complementing, such as in the recurring display of rainbows and the occasional appearance of Grizzly Adams. In this case the rainbow is a double-edged symbol, bittersweet and ironic. In the biblical tradition it exists as a symbol of God's covenant with creation (following the Flood) to never judge so severely again, to never punish humans or animals with cataclysmic destruction. Yet judgment, intolerance, and categorical proscription of homosexuality are epidemic amongst Christians. The rainbow embodies a longing for that pre-judgmental Eden, as does Grizzly Adams, who exists in a hermetic, Edenic wilderness where the unspoiled innocence of animals serves as a safe haven from society (which unjustly pursues him and seeks to exact punishment). Like Adam he names the animals; like Christ he rescues and adopts them, facilitating a society of idyllic co-habitation, of biblical community. The desire for this fictive ideal state is legible throughout the exuberance of impasto rainbows and the totemism of wild animals in Veltkamp's work. But also legible is the acknowledgment of the futility of such desire. Thus nostalgia becomes a way to negotiate disappointment. The use of animal symbolism, rainbows, and medium embodies this spirit of transfiguration and the idea that things like failure, futility, hope, and joy are fluidly connected facets of life.
Specific to the recent Rainbow series is an increased indulgence in the organic, libidinous aspect of paint that goes further to iterate (and make tangible, even tactile) this fluidity. Animals are spilling out of their function as static, symbolic objects and begin to embody a symbolically fragile place, where the disconnect between the ideal natural world and the disappointment of human failure can be co-opted as a space occupied by absolute possibility. The creatures have transformative powers, like prisms through which pain is brazenly transformed (to glitter, as the title of one painting suggests). "This ain't my first rodeo, fellas" is one of the most assertive of these works, depicting a horse that belonged to Veltkamp's father when he was a child. In the painting the horse has been changed into a proud stallion with storybook flowing mane, but its mouth has been thickly smeared with a glossy scarlet lipstick. It is a defiantly erotic gesture directed at a father figure whose homophobia contributed to a crushing sense of shame growing up. But shame has given way to a celebration of identity.
This celebratory spirit continually gives birth to a contagious sense of wonder. This spirit can also be located in the endlessly twisting, torquing blanket drawings Veltkamp produced at the same time as the Rainbow series. In these drawings the blankets pile up in whipped peaks and ruffling whorls of colorful pattern. These are the new era of diary drawings: no longer mechanized records of random surroundings, but a close, repetitive study of an object that manifests an endless line without beginning or end, that hints at infinite combinations and transformations, deliriously, colorfully turning inside out.
Joey Veltkamp’s body of work has been steadily evolving since he bought his first paints twelve years ago. His practice has increasingly involved toying with the alchemical marriage of meaning and material, but one characteristic of his work has remained constant throughout: that through it he manifests a seductively personal yet nuanced symbolic language, one that emerges gradually from the methodical mythologizing of cultural clichés and everyday objects. His engagement with the banal and trivial is especially prominent in much of his work of the past two years, notably in the prolificacy of diary drawings that demonstrate a need to map his domestic surroundings, cataloguing commonplace objects with such persistence and fixation that they take on an aura of the familiar and the mystical. These pieces read like snapshots, like mechanically-rendered dissections of a fleeting moment. Their style is almost always flat and neatly matter-of-fact - which is not to say they don't convey a touch of the humorous, somber, or perverse at times, but neither do they set out to be overtly expressive or political. Instead there’s a sense of ordering and patient recording, a studied pursuit of imagined taxonomies. The same stylistic and expressive reserve also exists in the iconographic animals that recur in Veltkamp's drawings and paintings, creatures which, considered altogether, comprise a bestiary laden with symbolic meaning that can be read as simultaneously personal and heavily appropriative. While more inherently political than the diary drawings (one can't help but form connections amid a constellation of animals identified with gay, hipster, and American west culture) they are still marked with the stylistic restraint and formalism of an icon painting.
This flatness is abandoned in Veltkamp's recent oil paintings. Suddenly there's a momentum toward material sensuality and autobiographical candor that injects the bestiary with visceral technicolor. Flatness gives way to a deluge of medium applied directly and energetically to the canvas in streaking, clumping, running thickness. In these rainbow-slicked paintings he's worked and re-worked (and decadently over-worked) the surfaces, scraping off colors, re-applying them again impulsively, obfuscating and erasing whole sections of canvas with semi-opaque scrims of black, watery paint drawn like a veil across illegible ghost-images. Staid iconography has given way to something darkly rich, vulnerable, and virile.
Work this liquid and messy and emphatically saturated in its own materiality speaks a language of corporeality, sexuality, transubstantiation. Liquid states are indeterminate states, communicable, malleable, hybrid, and these paintings exist in that province of partial meanings - of articulate but unfinished phrases that open up on vast lacunae of often-unspeakable or paradoxical things.
In the past Veltkamp has used the symbolic language of animals as a way to bridge the gap of the uncommunicable or unspeakable. Animals are often used to indicate aggressively protective spirits, totems, or mystical incarnations of the artist's identity and selfhood. (Growing up in rural Montana, small black bears trespassing alone across the family property weren't uncommon; the identification isn't a casual affectation.) Bears, owls, horses, deer, foxes, etc, can be symbols of self-sufficiency, invulnerability to human interference, and regeneration. Anthropomorphizing animals like this and imbuing them with mystical characteristics in an unapologetically nostalgic way risks coming off kitschy or didactic, but in the case of Veltkamp's work - and especially apparent in his oil paintings - nostalgia for a state of animal innocence and incorruptibility only reinforces the reality of a cruel, dystopian world. Naivety doesn't factor into any of the work. Rather, coupled with the fantasy of the animal kingdom is the recognition of vulnerability in the wilderness, violence, and the threat of abandonment. It can sometimes be read as downright melancholy, but in Veltkamp's practice melancholy and joy are intertwined. The dystopian always carries with it the possibility of transfiguration: sadness is a void from which an excess of hope and unrestrained desire erupts.
There is a suggestion of this transformative power in almost all his imagery and it is hinted at through a continual play of contrasting emotion, double meanings, repetitions, playful folding, and animal-spirit doppelgängers. It's perhaps most conspicuous when Christian and gay iconography overlap, contradicting or complementing, such as in the recurring display of rainbows and the occasional appearance of Grizzly Adams. In this case the rainbow is a double-edged symbol, bittersweet and ironic. In the biblical tradition it exists as a symbol of God's covenant with creation (following the Flood) to never judge so severely again, to never punish humans or animals with cataclysmic destruction. Yet judgment, intolerance, and categorical proscription of homosexuality are epidemic amongst Christians. The rainbow embodies a longing for that pre-judgmental Eden, as does Grizzly Adams, who exists in a hermetic, Edenic wilderness where the unspoiled innocence of animals serves as a safe haven from society (which unjustly pursues him and seeks to exact punishment). Like Adam he names the animals; like Christ he rescues and adopts them, facilitating a society of idyllic co-habitation, of biblical community. The desire for this fictive ideal state is legible throughout the exuberance of impasto rainbows and the totemism of wild animals in Veltkamp's work. But also legible is the acknowledgment of the futility of such desire. Thus nostalgia becomes a way to negotiate disappointment. The use of animal symbolism, rainbows, and medium embodies this spirit of transfiguration and the idea that things like failure, futility, hope, and joy are fluidly connected facets of life.
Specific to the recent Rainbow series is an increased indulgence in the organic, libidinous aspect of paint that goes further to iterate (and make tangible, even tactile) this fluidity. Animals are spilling out of their function as static, symbolic objects and begin to embody a symbolically fragile place, where the disconnect between the ideal natural world and the disappointment of human failure can be co-opted as a space occupied by absolute possibility. The creatures have transformative powers, like prisms through which pain is brazenly transformed (to glitter, as the title of one painting suggests). "This ain't my first rodeo, fellas" is one of the most assertive of these works, depicting a horse that belonged to Veltkamp's father when he was a child. In the painting the horse has been changed into a proud stallion with storybook flowing mane, but its mouth has been thickly smeared with a glossy scarlet lipstick. It is a defiantly erotic gesture directed at a father figure whose homophobia contributed to a crushing sense of shame growing up. But shame has given way to a celebration of identity.
This celebratory spirit continually gives birth to a contagious sense of wonder. This spirit can also be located in the endlessly twisting, torquing blanket drawings Veltkamp produced at the same time as the Rainbow series. In these drawings the blankets pile up in whipped peaks and ruffling whorls of colorful pattern. These are the new era of diary drawings: no longer mechanized records of random surroundings, but a close, repetitive study of an object that manifests an endless line without beginning or end, that hints at infinite combinations and transformations, deliriously, colorfully turning inside out.
Joey Veltkamp by Matthew Offenbacher
Commissioned for the SOIL's member catalog / 2012
Enthusiasm hasn’t been cool since ancient Greek times, when to be an enthusiast meant you were possessed by a god. Even then maybe it wasn’t so great. You might find yourself wine-stained and naked, dancing down the colonnade in the middle of the night. Flirting with disaster, however, is what makes Joey’s work so good. It courts embarrassment, reaching out with a fervor which continuously threatens to overflow propriety. When we think of an enthusiast these days, we think of someone who “loves too much”, or who refuses to “face up to reality.” However, enthusiasts like Joey (like me!) know that enthusiasm is really pragmatic and ethical. It comes from trying to reconcile what is inside with what is outside, in a manner that brings the most good into the world. This is the spirit infusing all of Joey’s work. Joy—honest, true, hard-won, industrial-strength joy, like you see in the paintings here—is, unmistakably, transfigured melancholy. This is what rainbows symbolize: the distance between disappointment and forgiveness, God’s measure of both human and divine folly. Non-human animals are untroubled by shame, doubt, or melancholy. If only we were more like them. But also, how great is it that we are not? Joey’s horses, bears, and owls exist in this in between place, the passage between “animal” and “human”. Enthusiasm travels this distance, originating in that deep, dark, opaque place, the place which is most essentially “you” but which you will never know, and so is the source of all you desire. Shoshana Felman once wrote, “Inescapably, enthusiasm is what passes; it is, therefore nothing: nothing, in any case, other than what is doomed—like us—to pass.” This is what Joey is up to. Enthusiasm, propelled by desire, alloyed with all that passes, is the strongest stuff.
—Matthew Offenbacher
Enthusiasm hasn’t been cool since ancient Greek times, when to be an enthusiast meant you were possessed by a god. Even then maybe it wasn’t so great. You might find yourself wine-stained and naked, dancing down the colonnade in the middle of the night. Flirting with disaster, however, is what makes Joey’s work so good. It courts embarrassment, reaching out with a fervor which continuously threatens to overflow propriety. When we think of an enthusiast these days, we think of someone who “loves too much”, or who refuses to “face up to reality.” However, enthusiasts like Joey (like me!) know that enthusiasm is really pragmatic and ethical. It comes from trying to reconcile what is inside with what is outside, in a manner that brings the most good into the world. This is the spirit infusing all of Joey’s work. Joy—honest, true, hard-won, industrial-strength joy, like you see in the paintings here—is, unmistakably, transfigured melancholy. This is what rainbows symbolize: the distance between disappointment and forgiveness, God’s measure of both human and divine folly. Non-human animals are untroubled by shame, doubt, or melancholy. If only we were more like them. But also, how great is it that we are not? Joey’s horses, bears, and owls exist in this in between place, the passage between “animal” and “human”. Enthusiasm travels this distance, originating in that deep, dark, opaque place, the place which is most essentially “you” but which you will never know, and so is the source of all you desire. Shoshana Felman once wrote, “Inescapably, enthusiasm is what passes; it is, therefore nothing: nothing, in any case, other than what is doomed—like us—to pass.” This is what Joey is up to. Enthusiasm, propelled by desire, alloyed with all that passes, is the strongest stuff.
—Matthew Offenbacher
