A Body Mapped by Satellites and Reclaimed by Art
How V. Maldonado Turns Running Into Painting on Their 14th Lap with Froelick Gallery
V. runs in circles. Sometimes for 13 miles. Sometimes for 32. Sometimes they are training to run 100 or 200 miles. When they are not trying to run farther, they are trying to run faster.
The circles are not a detour from their art practice. They are the practice.
V. puts it more simply:
“I’m just a little pony having fun”
V.’s newest paintings begin on the track, in the forest, on the road, or wherever their body is moving. They come out of GPS routes, breathing patterns, body heat, speed, memory, and the strange mental places a person reaches after running for a very long time.
At a certain point, V. says, they are no longer running. Everything else around them is running.
The earth is moving beneath them. The mind and body begin moving in different directions, while the legs somehow keep going.
V. is interested in that point. The moment when physical effort crosses into something harder to name. Something spiritual, disorienting, and occasionally a little ridiculous.
“I go on these runs to see myself,” they say. “The runs are art because I get to see what I can do.”
In the paintings, green can represent the body warming up. Orange is the body getting hotter. Lines may come from satellite maps, running applications, repeated laps, or the rhythm of V.’s breathing.
The paintings are not pictures of running. They are an attempt to make the experience visible.
Running has become a kind of automatic drawing. The body makes the first mark. The painting comes later.
One work traces a 13-mile run V. completed after their grandmother died. Other works hold the memory of a trail, a personal record, a period of grief, or the feeling of being alone with a body that refuses to stop moving.
V. has always been interested in making invisible things visible.
That includes creative labor, migrant labor, family labor, and the labor women are expected to perform without recognition or payment. It also includes the constant calculations made by queer and trans people as they move through classrooms, workplaces, institutions, and public space.
What can be shown?
What needs to remain hidden?
Who is watching?
V. sometimes describes the work as “surveillance photography.”
As a runner, they willingly allow satellites and apps to track their movements. The routes become lines, numbers, and colors on a screen. As a queer, trans Mexican person whose father was once undocumented, V. understands that being tracked can also carry a threat.
The same image can be a map of a run and a record of surveillance.
It can show freedom and control at the same time.
That contradiction runs through the paintings. They are joyful and physically alive, but they also carry grief, family history, displacement, and the complicated experience of being visible in a world that does not always make visibility feel safe.
V. came to Portland in 2000 or 2001, shortly after graduating from the California College of Arts and Crafts.
They were working next door to Froelick Gallery at the Augen Gallery. They were making prints, doing street theater, staying up late, and wearing what they now admit were occasionally questionable outfits.
V. remembers being a mess. Charles Froelick remembers it differently: “I saw V.’s energy.”
V. had put everything into becoming an artist. They had spent years in art school being warned that they might not finish, that they might not belong, and that the art world was not waiting to welcome them. Portland felt different.
Artists were putting exhibitions in garages. Galleries were willing to answer questions. People seemed to believe that art could belong to the people standing in front of it, not only to those who already knew how to speak the language.
V. did not yet know all the rules, which was probably useful. They approached Charles and asked him to represent them. “I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to ask for representation willy-nilly,” V. says.
They also did not understand the size of the request. Representation was not simply an invitation to hang some paintings. It was a request for belief, commitment, and time.
Charles said yes.
V.’s first exhibition with Froelick Gallery was in 2001. This is their fourteenth.
Fourteen shows is a lot of laps. The relationship has given V. something artists rarely receive enough of: time to change.
V. has never wanted to discover one successful style and repeat it forever. Their work has moved through printmaking, painting, performance, education, social media, distance running, and sculpture. Not every experiment arrived fully formed.
During studio visits, Charles sometimes told V. that the work was not there yet. It needed more development. It needed more time. V. got the time.
“I got 26 years to develop into exactly the kind of artist that I wanted to be, that I needed to be,” they say.
The running paintings are part of that development. They bring together the artist, teacher, athlete, family member, and conceptual thinker V. has become.
The same is true of the sculptures in the exhibition.
They were carved from pieces of a birch tree that once stood outside V.’s family home. Their children used to swing from it. When the tree became sick and had to be removed, V. held on to the wood.
They carried it through divorce, family changes, and the creation of a new life.
V. did not know how to make chainsaw sculptures. So they watched a television competition about chainsaw artists, decided that was probably enough instruction, and bought a chainsaw.
Inside the wood, V. began to see the image of their father crossing the Rio Grande.
Their father ran through the wilderness wearing huaraches. There were no advanced trail shoes, race officials, sponsors, or people waiting to hand him a medal.
He did not have papers.
Because he made that journey, V. eventually did.
“I got all the papers,” V. says. “I’m a citizen now. I got the BFA. I got the MFA. I got all the papers.”
V. thinks of the sculptures as doorstops.
Their father crossed a border and held a door open for them. The sculptures ask what V. can now do with that opening.
A doorstop is not glamorous. It is not the door, the building, or the person walking through it. It simply refuses to let the door close.
For V., that is part of the responsibility of being an artist, educator, and member of a community. The goal is not only to gain access to a gallery, classroom, or institution. It is to keep that space open for the people coming behind you.
That principle also shapes the way V. teaches. They do not enter a classroom to give students the correct answers. They prefer to ask questions nobody in the room knows how to answer and then work through them together.
The same process exists in the studio and on the track.
Begin without knowing exactly where you will end.
Pay attention to what your body and the material are telling you. Keep moving!
Return to the same question and see whether you have become someone capable of answering it differently
V.’s work is about endurance, but not the grim, teeth-clenched kind.
It is endurance as curiosity. Endurance as repetition. Endurance as the privilege of being allowed to keep developing. A runner can finish exactly where they started and still be changed by the distance between those two points.
A painter can return to the same gallery fourteen times without making the same exhibition. V. continues to run in circles. The route repeats. The body changes.
The paintings come back carrying evidence of where they have been. And behind them, the door remains open.
During the gallery conversation, someone wondered whether a collector would want to buy a work connected to a funeral. Another person answered, “It might not be people buying a funeral, but people are buying an intergenerational love.”
V. immediately recognized the truth in that. The work may begin with V.’s body, family, and history, but it does not end there. “I get to tell the truth and you get to tell the truth,” V. says.
“Our truths don’t have to align because our values align.”
A collector does not simply take home the record of V.’s run. They take home the distance traveled, the family carried, and the body reclaimed. The work leaves the gallery still in motion, and by being chosen, lived with, and made part of someone else’s life, the journey continues.