Evelin Velasquez’s artistic process takes months. It begins by finding a place that is perfectly run-down.
“I look for places in ruins, where time has done the score on them,” Velasquez, of Medellin, Colombia, said through an interpreter. “I am trying to find beauty in what is dead and decayed.”
In the months after she finds a perfect place, Velasquez, aided by a team of volunteers, formulates a diorama, with costumes, makeup and props, to both accentuate and elevate the location from a state of decrepitude to a state of grace. Her imagery, appropriately, is religious is nature. She is the center of her own scene, casting herself as the Virgin Mary. Then she takes a picture.
Five of Velasquez’s photographs are on exhibit now at Fernando Luis Alvarez Gallery in Stamford. Along with the photos the gallery is showing videos of her photo sessions, process photographs and, enhancing the mood of weather-beaten piety, religious statues loaned by United House Wrecking of Stamford.
Velasquez created a “Piedad” (“Pieta”) in which Mary’s face has the same bluish oozy pallor as the moldy walls. “She is being absorbed … seeping through the walls,” she said. In her “Silencios,” her Mary has a ghoulish white face and a black gown and holds several broken sculptures of babies. She is surrounded by molded faces of Jesus.
“It is inspired by Medea, contrasting the monster and the virgin,” she said. “It is almost like a contradiction, violent and disturbing.”
Her “Virgen de los Lirios” shows Mary amidst dozens of religious statues, all white. “It’s an erasure of the virgin. The babies keep coming,” she said. “They surround her in a suffocating way.”
Velasquez said her work isn’t intended to be blasphemous.
“I never thought that. Maybe some persons will think that. It’s not my intention, but if people think that, it’s not a problem.”
TRANSFIGURATIONS, photographs by Evelin Velasquez, will be at Fernando Luis Alvarez Gallery, 96 Bedford St., in Stamford, until Dec. 11. Gallery hours are Wednesday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; and weekends noon to 7 p.m. www.flalvarezgallery.com.
