Xela Institute of Art is pleased to present The Subtleties of Levitated Things, a solo exhibition of the work of chris velez. Opening on October 5, 2024, the exhibition will be on view until December 15, 2024.
 velez is, in the first place, a shapeshifter: his interdisciplinary practice spans painting, sculpture, performance art, video-work, photography, and new genres. The breadth of his material and embodied practice reflects velez’ many encyclopedic and varied interests. Many of his thematic concerns address the interface between the bodily, the technological, and the natural worlds, but the representational vehicles that most often appear in his work are avatars — stand-ins for a kind of composite awareness or chimeric body. 
 What is, for most people, a clear distinction between the body and the larger natural world dissolves into a colorful jumble of cartoonish pictographs and tripped-out digital mediations through velez’ playful escapades.There is both a surreal and intensely graphic quality to some of velez’ compositional decisions: fleshy earth- and skin-toned material dialects come into uneasy contact with bright exclamations of plastic and super-saturated oil pastel markings, and high culture constantly confronts pop culture in a see-saw of competing perspectives. In his assemblage and tableau works especially, there is the sense that velez has curated a selection of ersatz specimens and put them on view so that the public may reconsider the core nature of each: an iPhone may appear as a tiny, hairy creature in one instance and in another, as a semi- viscous blob dripping off of a table — a clever nod to Dali’s famous clock painting. For velez, creative practice is seamlessly integrated into everyday life and its amoeba strip of observations. Sometimes, the art is as simple and as incidental as documenting a bright yellow fire hydrant nestled among daisies, or as complex as re-staging an entire office cubicle with all its low-vibrational bureaucratic fixings. velez aims to hybridize and complicate binaristic distinctions between nature and technology, opting for a more rhizomatic referential approach. Pseudo- and actual digital distortions feature heavily in his sculptural and painterly gestures: a basketball hoop may bend impossibly towards the ground, as if a sad cartoon character, a disembodied hand may sprout fungal growths, or an emoticon may float above a drop shadow or within a hyperflat vacuum. TV screens operate, almost archaeologically, as rote stone objects and scenes-within-scenes. They might also reappear as flickering screen-portals displaying jumbles of text and pixelated masses, recalling glitch-art, data-moshing and early internet DIY aesthetics. A viewer is just as likely to encounter a bottled oak tree as an open desk drawer blocked off by a mysterious printed waterscape. Somehow, through it all, velez manages to create uneasy alliances between dimensional material and photographic fragments. Much of velez’ work unfolds like a retro-futurist vision, a post-human landscape where rogue digital, spectral, and spiritual energies run rampant. The artist is technologically and technically savvy, bouncing between televisual special effects, 3D models, cropped jpegs, and painterly anamorphisms. He animates and resamples ideas by using the visual language of mashups and mixtapes, psychedelics and non-Western spirituality, uncanny valley and humor. His work feels like a new millennium TikTok philosophy, working to connect people’s aesthetic experiences with more simultaneity and immediacy than ever before — but his ultimate ambition lies in expanding collective human consciousness.