Historically, assemblage has mixed substandard materials to yield a kind of anti-art which pasted, pressed, glued, nailed, cut, stapled and painted “found”, previously intact, and everyday objects into new, expanded forms. Montgomery’s assemblages (called paintings by the gallery) have much in common with two-dimensional abstract paintings such as Robert Motherwell’s Western Air (1946) and Gertrude Greene’s Monumentality (1949), only re-imagined as three-dimensional relief sculptures. The stronger precedent can be found in Jean Pougny’s (Ivan Puni) 1915 Suprematist Sculpture which might account for their “strange familiarity”.
Velveteen’s locus of inquiry in sculpture continues with minimalist sculptures made of shims, or tapered pieces of wood. On one end of the continuum are Large Shim: 13 and Large Shim: 7, two 10-foot tall wall-mounted, natural, red cedar shims in varying widths. The strong wedge shapes, suggesting exclamation points minus the dots, share the enthusiasm of Hisayuki Mogami’s 1962 curvilinear pine sculpture Laugh, Laugh, Laugh.
The most muscular of the shim series is Image One Hundred Thirty, a protruding, black lacquer wall sculpture of cedar shims arranged as alternating wedges and suggesting charred wood. Additionally, three similar wall sculptures use cedar or cardboard constructs mimicking shims with faux wood finishes or covered in white paint.
On the other end, two large marbles marked with the deep indentations of a marble saw rest on the floor. The found objects pulled from a Vermont stream have much in common with the wall sculptures, although they predate them, temporarily filling in the gap where the “paintings” did not yet exist, the artist wondering if their “resemblance” to the paintings suggest that all images are “just waiting to be found”.