Contact

As a researcher, artist, educator, and cultural organizer, I have begun positioning myself as a “visual criticologist.” This title is a neologism, an invented term that gestures to ways of approaching visual culture. Through scholarly discourse within environmental humanities, new media, and queer affect, I attend to concerns around the perceptibility of (im)material agents like environmental toxins, by engaging critical thinking and artistic practice in the Americas, and considering my own lived experience as a queer of color person within the Filipinx diaspora.

My recent essay Midwest Minimalism: Toxicity and Artistic Praxis Across Human and Other-than-human Worlds (2025), reconceptualizes a minimalist aesthetic that unsettles art historical critiques, and instead centers queer of color temporalities and modes of refusal, play, and speculative world-building. By focusing on contemporary video and moving image art, I arrive to a visual and discursive approach to the “Chemosphere,” a world entangled in chemical and biopolitical forces.

Recently, I was selected as a participant in the 2025 Chicago Curatorial Seminar, hosted by Independent Curators International. I have presented my research at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and in graduate conferences at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Tufts University, and UC Santa Barbara. My artworks and performances have exhibited at Color Club (Chicago), Uncle Art Gallery (Chicago), and Dittmar Gallery (Evanston, IL). In 2025, I graduated with a Masters in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Prior to this, I obtained a BA Honors (Summa Cum Laude) in Culture and Expression from York University in Toronto, 2023.

midwestmarvv
marvvelos@gmail.com
Chicago, IL 2025