Cristina Velásquez “As If It Were the Sun” @ Assembly, Houston

Cristina Velásquez’s new exhibition at Assembly’s brand new brick-and-mortar gallery in Houston extends the Colombian artist’s inquiry into the photographic gaze against issues of identity, history, and colonialism through photographs and photographic weavings made with cardboard. The straight, color photographs are purposeful fragments of larger narratives. Drawing the viewer’s attention to the reductive nature of the medium, this work opposes the photograph’s tendency to distill its subject’s intersectional relationship to the world into a single quality—often viewed from a Western perspective—“the sun.” For Velásquez, similar to identity, the function of the photograph is to explore rather than to define. It presents an opportunity for vulnerability, dialogue, and even collaboration. As If It Were the Sun reorients viewers away from a hegemonic view to…