Courtesy of Christopher Velasco.
What: Artist Talk featuring Christopher Velasco
When: Monday, November 25 from 9:30-10:45
Where: In person in HFH 1104. If you are sick or out-of-town, join via Zoom:
Artist's Website: https://www.christopheravelascophotography.com
Artist's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/caver83/
Artist Bio:
Christopher Anthony Velasco (b. 1983) is a photographer and performance artist based in Los Angeles, known for his exploration of the queer brown body and his innovative blend of horror and camp aesthetics. He earned his Master of Fine Arts from UC Santa Barbara in 2019 and his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts in 2011.
Velasco has contributed to his field through various internships, including positions at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles) and UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center and Library as a Getty Marrow Undergraduate Intern. He is an adjunct professor at Ventura and Moorpark Community College and Los Angeles Valley College and instructs at CSSSA (California State Summer School of the Arts).
His work has been prominently featured in exhibitions at esteemed venues such as the Art Center College of Design, AD&A Museum, Avenue 50 Studios, the California Institute of the Arts, the Hibbleton Gallery, the Getty Museum, and the Vincent Price Art Museum. Furthermore, Velasco has collaborated with Harry Gamboa, Jr., notably through Virtual Verite, and performed at Los Angeles Union Station, UC Santa Barbara, and LAST Projects.
Artist Statement:
My photographic works often incorporate performance-based encounters with clearly defined boundaries of the photograph structure that defy purpose or permanence. Each of my photographs captures the unsustainable gaze upon a disregarded, disfigured body that is constantly evolving, descending, and autodestructing into endless layers of lost memory. The uncanny loops camp aesthetics together.
My efforts to capture the briefest moments of awareness most often result in wonderfully played-out visual vignettes that echo beyond the existence of the façade that sustains the original setting of place or subject.
Through my photographic works, I have effectively portrayed the fragility between existence and metaphor. My sense of self serves as a medium by which characterizations can be asserted in visual form. My insistence that role-playing, role reversal, and role surrender are all acts of defiance against that which portends to control the destiny of the image gives my photographic works an essential urgency and definite positive charge.
