Courtesy of Christopher Velasco.
What: Artist Talk featuring Christopher Velasco
When: Monday, May 11 from 12:30-1:45
Where: via Zoom:
Artist's Website: https://www.christopheravelascophotography.com
Artist's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/caver83/
Artist Bio:
Christopher Anthony Velasco (born 1983) is a photographer and performance artist based in Los Angeles, known for exploring the queer brown body and blending horror with camp aesthetics. He earned his Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, 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 Moorpark College and East Los Angeles College, and he teaches at CSSSA (California State Summer School of the Arts).
His work has been prominently showcased in exhibitions at respected 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. Additionally, Velasco has collaborated with Harry Gamboa, Jr., notably through Virtual Verite, and has performed at Los Angeles Union Station, UC Santa Barbara, and LAST Projects. Velasco's work is part of collections at The Getty Museum, Alta Med Art Collection, Cerritos College Art Gallery, UC Santa Barbara Department of Art, Keck School of Medicine at USC Research, and East Los Angeles College Photography Department.
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 beautifully played-out visual vignettes that echo beyond 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.
