QUEENS, NY.- no hay medio tiempo / there is no halftime brings together a series of new and site-specific works in a reflection on the global mobility of people and their cultures. A transplant from Ecuador, Ronny Quevedo grew up playing soccer in Flushing Meadows Corona Park with his late father, a player and referee. “No hay medio tiempo,” a phrase used in the titles for the larger exhibition and its centerpiece, refers to his father’s assertion that “halftime” is not a break, but rather a moment signaling “the end of the first half and the start of the second.” Applying this notion beyond the world of games, Quevedo’s work investigates cycles of beginning and ending in objects, life, and memory.
Quevedo has turned the Museum’s skylight-lit atrium into an arena with an energetically complex line drawing that animates the surface of its wooden floor. Against the bold, geometric abstraction of the colorful vinyl lines are erratic, white markings that trace the artist’s shifting of a concrete and chalk soccer ball across the floor. Quevedo’s movement, its instability and control, is recorded in these ephemeral markings, which are dispersed by viewers’ footsteps over time. With marks from game court diagrams and player movements, no hay medio tiempo / there is no halftime, (after Glissant and Quevedo), 2017, poetically alludes to personal and social histories of migration, focused on those of populations from Central and South America where soccer, or fútbol, has deep cultural roots.
Four flags hang from the skylight directly above no hay medio tiempo and at the four corners of the Museum’s exterior. Entitled wayqe pana / brother sister, 2017, these feature the graphic emblems, or wiphalas, representing the regions of the Inca Empire (1438 to 1533)—Chinchasuyu, Antisuyu, Kuntisuyu, and Qullasuyu. In calling forth these ancient markers of kinship, Quevedo questions divisions of identity along the national borderlines of present day countries such as Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, and Colombia, where the Empire once ruled. As they draw our eyes up to the cosmos, the flags serve as a tribute to legacies of mobility, complexity, and the unity of the Andean ancestry.
Framed wall works serve as a legend for the installation: a reproduced news clipping, the poet of relation, c.1958, 2017, features an image that aligns the player (his father Carlos), the goal line, the ball, the stadium, and the night; The Main Event (Nomadic Structures), 2016, highlights movements that go beyond existing structures; and (Lyra), 2017, a drawing with silver leaf, conflates the terrestrial (the soccer field diagram) and the celestial (the constellation), in an embodiment of Quevedo’s father—loss and remembrance playing out together.
Ronny Quevedo (b. 1981, Guayaquil, Ecuador) earned his MFA from Yale University and BFA from The Cooper Union. He has exhibited at venues including The Drawing Center and El Museo del Barrio, New York City; The Bronx Museum of the Arts; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Upfor Gallery, Portland. He has participated in residencies at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace; the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston; Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture; and Kala Art Institute, Berkeley. He has been published in Artforum for his collaborative project, Specter Field, with Harold Mendez. Quevedo currently lives and works in New York City.
