MARVIN VELOSO Mercy (Ecology) (2022)

MARVIN VELOSO
Mercy (Ecology) (2022)
Wood, stick, used lottery ticket, beads, shells, needle and
thread, earring, sticker
5” x 5”
$750

ARTIST STATEMENT:
“Mercy (Ecology)” was created through collecting discarded materials from Toronto Island, an urban archipelago situated along Lake Ontario. In assembling these found-objects, themes of play interweave through diasporic reflections of archipelagic space and time. “Mercy (Ecology)” alludes to the metaphysical tensions between island–continent, prompting viewers to consider traces of labor that re/animate fragmentations, while holding together scattered materials, like a chain of islands. As a Canadian-born artist within the Filipinx diaspora, I reflect upon the cultural landscapes that have shaped how I understand identity, my relationship to the Great Lakes region, and the potential for reimagining new maps. In challenging imperial cartographies, I seek to produce a concept of archipelagic diaspora that through affective geographies brings in proximity, histories of the Pacific Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, and the Caribbean toward the Great Lakes. These narratives anticipate a self-reflexivity, as well as a mode of solidarity and resistance against totalization.

ARTIST BIO:
Marvin Veloso is a Chicago-based artist and scholar interested in storytelling, embodiment, and the ways language and culture shape relationships with the environment. Through performance, writing, and visual art he explores alternative narratives that unsettle anthropocentric world views and in turn, proposes new ways of being in the age of climate crises. As a queer person-of-color within the Filipinx diaspora, Veloso is informed by collective and personal memory of community placemaking, envisioning interconnectedness across water–land, nature–culture, and social and ecological change. By confronting the representational legacies of colonialism and imperialism, he approaches history as a site of contention and invites critical reflection and play as generative modes of resistance, affect, and agency. Marvin Veloso is currently a graduate student in the department of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago.