Ready to Articulate

Mark Gonzales Nieves In Collaboration with HVW8 28 Pages24.5 x 24.5 cmColor OffsetFirst Edition 2023 The artworks crackle with movement fittingly – Gonzales is a dancer, in the tradition of Merce Cunningham or Trisha Brown, but on wheels. His teenage years in 1980s Los Angeles were spent traversing the streets, which, by proxy, became his moving canvas. He earned a reputation as a pioneer of modern skateboarding – a master, albeit one not bound by flawlessness or precision, but the anarchy afforded only after achieving true mastery. It was as if he haphazardly broke the laws of nature, causing time and space to bend to him, leaving a wake of influential agitation behind him.His art, like his poetry, is not separate from his skating. Gonzales’s canvases are filled with painterly technique honed over years of drawing and painting, but they also exhibit a shambolic quality; the works are precise and imprecise all at once. This particular body is inspired by the disappointment he felt when