7.30.07 ACAMONCHI ART SHOW
Osiris artist “Acamonchi” has a solo show, Conexiones Extranas Guey, opening this from Friday Aug. 3rd, from 8 to 11 p.m., at Voz Alta, 1544 Broadway, in downtown San Diego. Acamonchi’s artwork will be featured on shoes in the Osiris Girls Artist Series line coming out in Fall 2008.
Acamonchi has been active in the underground Tijuana/Ensenada art scene since the 1980s. Last year’s Strange New World: Art and Design from Tijuana exhibition a show at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art has recently pushed Acamonchi closer to the mainstream art world, but the artist isn’t letting the attention change him. Behind the playful Acamonchi moniker is a very grounded and clever 36-year-old artist named Gerardo Yepiz. Yepiz is just a regular guy living a modest, vegan and gluten-free lifestyle in North Park. He just happens to be obsessed with art and creation. Yepiz paints, stencils, stamps, spray paints, screenprints and hand-draws his work onto large and small wood panels. He works an average of 10 hours a day in his tiny North Park studio, filling each piece with layers and layers of symbols and texture. Each figure, stamp, line and image reflects the bicultural world in which he lives. Looking at an Acamonchi piece is like traveling through time, space and countries. Your eye bounces from an obscure reference to Aphex Twin to Tijuana’s zebra-painted donkey to Stormtroopers and back to an image of an old Mac or a drawing of his favorite image, the tree stump, which he says represents broken dreams. Everything, every little detail that Acamonchi puts into each piece has meaning. “There’s always something hidden,” he explains, “untold stories in my work: little things here and there that you’ll eventually see or understand as time goes by.”
For more info www.acamonchi-art.com . www.vozalta.org
