In an upcoming solo show at Jason Vass Gallery, Mark Dean Veca offers works crafted during the past nine years. “The Troubled Teens (Work of a Decade),” running Jan. 26 through March 9, features acrylic works like “Back Off,” crafting Yosemite Sam in Veca fashion. All of the paintings bring Veca’s stylized pattern-making and textures to reconstruct pop cultural and political symbols. Veca was last mentioned on HiFructose.com here.
Mark Dean Veca, one of the featured artists in “Turn the Page: The First Ten Years of Hi-Fructose,” created a new installation for the exhibition’s final stop at Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. The absorbing, surreal “Maddest Hatter” greets visitors straight out of the elevator at the museum. In an Instagram video, the artist guides viewers through the completed installation.
Hi-Fructose Vol. 23 featured artist Mark Dean Veca’s colorful, dynamic paintings pop off the page in bright red, orange, and turquoise hues, with curvaceous lines inspired by the underground comic world. His work incorporates everything from pop culture references like Tony the Tiger and Scrooge McDuck to Americana elements like the Lincoln Memorial to the American Flag, to religious iconography including skulls, Buddhas, and Ganeshas – all filtered through his own gaze. The Los Angeles based artist is now in Virginia, where we’ve invited him to create special installation for the Turn the Page: The First Ten Years of Hi-Fructose, opening tonight at Virginia MOCA.
Habitat for Humanity in Michigan is giving artists the opportunity to turn underutilized structures turn them into art. One of them is HF Vol. 23 featured artist Mark Dean Veca, whose contribution is curated by Paul Amenta of SiTE:LAB, a local volunteer arts organization of site-specific works. For the project, Veca created an award-winning mural installation entitled “Pony Show” which will be unveiled on September 25th.
In ten years, Thinkspace Gallery in Culver City has accumulated quite the family- over 100 artists strong. Commemorating their 10th anniversary, opening January 10th, their artists will come together for an unprecedented group show. Featured here are contributions by Troy Lovegates, So Youn Lee, Keita Morimoto, Scott Listfield, Mark Dean Veca (Vol. 23), Dalek aka James Marshall (Vol. 15), Brett Amory (Vol. 20), Ryan Hewett, Kwon Kyung-yup (Vol. 24), Henrik Aa. Uldalen (Vol. 24 cover artist) and Sarah Joncas.
The lines between art and product design become blurred in Mark Dean Veca’s upcoming exhibition, “Everlast,” at Western Project in LA. While some artists appropriate the language of advertising to critique consumer culture, Veca (featured in HF Vol. 23) enjoys looking at logos and views them as a perfect marriage between images and text. For “Everlast,” which opens on October 18, he looked back on the signage that surrounded him during his 1970s upbringing in the San Francisco Bay Area. Some of the logos in the show are borrowed and some are original, but Veca transforms them with his rich, illustrative line work. Forms that would normally be flat come alive with the biomorphic textures for which he is known.