Dead & Company GD60 at Golden Gate Park Polo Fields — Concert Review
- Butch Weaver
Artist Profile: VELLY
Artist Profile: VELLY
The best combination is the gaze of a monster and a touch of fashionable polish.
What do we love most about psychedelic art? The blending of high and low, possible and impossible, sacred and profane, serious and super-serious. We love the feeling of freedom and the seemingly forgotten sensation that miracles are possible in the world, even if it’s just a half-dreamed vision of a seven-armed goddess riding a giant hermit crab. We love unusual optics; we love mind-boggling color combinations and captivating metamorphoses. For example, emerging psychedelic artist VELLY has decided that her psychedelic art practice will be based on a nuclear mix of an inhuman gaze and the aesthetics of fashion magazines and glossy photographs. This approach allows her to showcase maximal genre oddity and creative independence while remaining within a recognizable space communicated to a broad audience, at least at the level of form.
VELLY
VELLY’s formal techniques are like a steroid-fuelled Barbie land crossed with the cautious androgyny of 90s cyberpunk. The characters in her works are both conventionally beautiful models frozen before the photographer and inherently frozen ancient statues. The characters are full of air and bright, acid colors. They appear to be floating amidst the clouds, and it is known only to a rare chance why they assume such a position, color palette, and expressions reminiscent of a late new age. These faces gaze upon the world with a high degree of grandeur. It is hard to say what contributes to the effect of these characters possessing an inner majesty, but this is simply one of the traps of the artist. Because as we begin to ponder the patterns of the existence of these characters under given circumstances, we forget to realize and determine for ourselves whose eyes we are looking through.
VELLY
Here lies the most powerful artistic discovery of artist VELLY, the importance of which is hard to overestimate, especially now amidst the crisis of humanism and general doubts about whether humans and their values are significant for the future of the universe. VELLY gives us the precious opportunity to see her characters through the eyes of non-human objects. We see these characters as blurred, vibrating, breaking free from their contours, with repeating patterns and body parts, highlighted with astonishing color accents. Paradoxically, this is how various beings perceive the world: in reality, these beings are flying insects, spiders, and bats; in the realm of psychedelic fiction, they are guardians of good and bad trips, astral entities, and other creatures that need not be real. VELLY provides us with the opportunity to view the aesthetics of fashion magazines through the eyes of beings that are as far from us as possible. This is not merely a playful gimmick of a contemporary artist but a serious gesture that requires extensive preparation and a high level of skill.
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