Andre Veloux
BIO
British artist Andre Veloux, resides in Princeton, NJ with his wife and daughter. He has shown at galleries across the country including Scope Art Miami, and recently held his first live art event at Princeton University centred on the theme of consent. He is represented by the Krause Gallery, New York City, his third show at the gallery opening in October 2019. His feminist work is defined artistically within the parameters of modern feminism and gender exploration. Which is standing up for women and their rights and empowerment. Standing against the patriarchal society and its male entitlement which cause discrimination, oppression and violence against women. His work which is created entirely from Lego is in private collections worldwide and has been installed in public spaces as well as many group shows.
His work has been featured on Insider Art, Vice, Quiet Lunch, Blended NYC, Curated by Girls, The Tax Collection, WideWalls, Little Things TV and many others.
ARTIST STATEMENT
The focus of work is a feminist, gender equality and women’s rights project, which explores the way women are viewed and society’s expectations of them.
A series of portraits of feminist icons, show strong, powerful and self-motivated women, some of whom have reached iconic status for their work and influence, and in themselves are agents of change in society. Female icons are at the very forefront of the women’s rights movement because of all the things that these women have achieved and the circumstances in which they achieved them. Women leaders in all fields, be it political, scientific, business, artistic or humanitarian are under intense and constant scrutiny.
A second series includes portraits illustrating the mask of femininity. Created from blending features of different faces to create a single visual. These comment on the constant demands on women to continually rebuild and renew how they present themselves. The fact that these artworks are created using building blocks which you can take apart and rebuild in different ways, plays on the ceaseless demands on women to rebuild the image they present to the world in order to gain acceptance.
Included in the project are further sets of works, Freedom Without Judgement, Briefs and Panties, and Anti-Portraits. The first of which depict women’s clothing and appearance, defending the right to present one’s self freely, without fearing harassment or intervention from others. In the second case, a series of diptychs containing a man’s briefs and a woman’s panties illustrate the different form, function and ultimately expectations of men and women through the underwear they wear. The anti-portrait works showing a woman’s back, comment on the sexualization of the female form, society’s bearer of sexuality, as well as demonstrating vulnerability, and in particular the lack of consent in being seen or perhaps imagined in this scenario.
A number of untitled works, which go under the umbrella of a series entitled Enthusiastic Consent are direct in their meaning and interpretation, as a direct response to rape culture, no means no, and only an enthusiastic yes means yes.
All of the works are made with commercially available Lego bricks. Lego, in all its various forms, is at the same time limiting as well as limitless in its possibilities. The color palette is limited yet consistent, and the basic “pixel” size is also fixed. Yet at the same time, it is a hard, durable, tactile and lightweight material; it can be reused, replaced and altered at will, and provides a myriad of different possibilities due to the different available shaped bricks, tiles and plates, with the exciting opportunity to create the 3-dimensional and textural aspects of the art.