Alx Velozo / Collapsing distance

Stair Rubber Cane, 2021. silicone rubber, wire, acrylic rod, 30 x 40” x 6”

For the descriptive voiceover poem he created for Not Just Included—Embedded, his 2025 film about accessibility in the informal architecture of Taipei, the Danish-born artist and critic Troels Steenholdt Heiredal writes: “here-- people's manifold voices/ coalesce with the city/ producing its expression.” Through their interventions in both objects and performances American artist Alx Velozo imagines a similar world, in which the infrastructure of a place reflects and embraces a diversity of bodily experiences and capacities. Upon entering a space, they told me that they want to know: “What kind of disabled life are they proposing in this architecture, in this built space?” Through sculptures that transform the mobility and stability aids they regularly use, namely canes and grab bars, as well as works that playfully recontextualize and resituate the biomorphic silicone grips used on climbing walls, Velozo seeks to move disabled bodies away from the margins, where their existence is barely tolerated by minimal ADA compliance (if that), to all areas and all levels of the gallery space.

Speculative Grab Bars 1 - 4, 2023. PVC pipe, silicon, graphite, hardware, dimensions variable

Despite their vivid colors and whimsical shapes, pieces such as the Speculative Grab Bars series (2023), Stair Rubber Cane (2021), Pink Rbbr Cane (2021), Gray Rbbr Cane (2021), and Grope (2021), are not merely formal retinal gestures, but are rather meant to be touched and used. Velozo sees a connection between these phenomena, the aesthetics of intangibility and the architectural disavowal of difference, in a term that the Deaf/blind poet John Lee Clark refers to as “distantism”, a form of bigotry he formulated when trying to determine “the opposite of tactile”. “They take things out of our reach,” Clark writes, “and then they say we have limited awareness.” The ramps, railings, and elevators grudgingly bestowed as outcomes of Universal Design all signify to Velozo an implied injunction; it’s like the space is saying to them: “just don't be weird like that… or you're getting too close, and you're touching too much.”

Follow My Tracks, still from a 12 min performance, 3 day rest period. 2020

In their performances, Velozo makes full use of the audience’s senses and personal space, displaying their body as simultaneously vulnerable and erotic while choreographically enacting their critique of the distantism they’ve long experienced in encounters with the medical-industrial complex, as well the inaccessibility of dance clubs where they would otherwise find energy and community. Dressed in white for their performance Follow My Tracks (2021), Velozo uses their cane to dance rhythmically across a floor covered in white cornstarch, leaving a serpentine path in their wake. They are lit entirely by flashlights held by audience members, and accompanied by a soundtrack that spliced together the audio they spent hours listening to while on hold with their medical provider, with a recording of genderqueer and chronically ill activist Johanna Hedva reading their 2020 essay, “Sick Woman Theory”.

As with all their performances, Velozo’s breath becomes more labored, of necessity, over the span of the performance. And as with the other performances they have posted online, the listed duration of the work includes both the time of the performance and of the following recovery period. Follow My Tracks was intended in part to represent Velozo’s urgent desire for accountability during a traumatically difficult period of misdiagnosis and non-diagnosis of their underlying conditions. They told me: “I just felt like no one has tabs on me, no one's following me, no one's watching me and checking that I'm gonna make it through my week, that I'm gonna make it to any kind of medical information that could like help me see a future.”

Breath Play, still from 3 hr performance, 4 day post rest period. 2021

In Velozo’s long performance Breath Play, also from 2021, they move slowly with their cane through a space filled with white balloons, which squeak and pop against their body and their translucent latex garments. These sensual elements call attention to overlaps between fetish culture and medical imagery and materials, although Velozo doesn’t want this reading to overwhelm other aspects of the piece. Breath Play again visually embraces the whiteness of clinical spaces and printed paperwork, as well as Velozo’s strong need to exist and move primarily in a horizontal mode, defying the austere ableist verticality of visual arts spaces. This horizontality is a similarly defining element of their low-mounted sculptural installations, whose placement imply kneeling, squatting, and crawling in the process of installation, as well as inviting responses that could include writhing and rolling on the ground, propelled by pulling and pushing against Velozo’s interactive adaptive forms.

Level, still from 15 minute performance, 3 day rest period. 2024.

Their private physical experiences of pain, endurance, breath, and equilibrium come across in a different register with Level, from 2024, an entirely floor-based performance in which Velozo leaves their cane to the side and restricts their movement to a padded mat. The work is presented as a video, and tight shots allow viewers to see bubbles slide back and forth in the 500 bubble levels studding Velozo’s form-fitting shirt. The soundtrack is quiet, but the mix that Velozo is listening to on earpods is described in their accompanying essay, “Labor of Level”, as a playlist they created for Club Bed, “a guided workshop surrounding horizontality and access to club space as a disabled queer person”, in the Dancing Disability Lab at the University of California, Los Angeles. Developed in the Club Bed workshop and demonstrated in Level, Velozo explores a choreography based on points of contact, counting and alternating parts of their body that touch and resist the floor. Their dynamic, staccato undulation, shifting direction, speed, and scale while doubled in the mirrored wall of the studio where the performance is recorded, calls to mind the “complex linear forms and different levels” they spoke of to me in describing their sculptural work.

Vigil for a Flare, 2023. Rope, resin, candles, hardware, 40” x 22” x 18”

Their abstract formal aesthetic of twining and tangling also exists in a largely earlier body of sculptural work, the most recent example of which is Vigil for a Flare (2023), a floor-based assemblage of lit yellow candles adorning a twisting bundle of colorful rope. Some older pieces in this vein include Play Party and Hole Alphabet (2018), a table, shelf, and stool partly transformed into semi-organic, semi-industrial concrete surfaces to contain variously-colored sculptural blobs; Stretch Marked (2017), a shiny curved lump of unfired clay on a low pedestal displayed under two wire screens and a blue light bulb; and Ear’s Phault (2016), a squat, table-esque piece which suggests a depiction of a large asphalt stylized ear, curved like the sole of a shoe in mid-stride above a line of tall grass growing from a sidewalk crack. While all of Velozo’s objects are biomorphic and clearly address the body, this group of pieces, if somewhat more retinal, do evoke a more psychic dimension. For me they call to mind the polymorphous conflation of gendered body parts and domestic appliances presented in the resolutely queer Surrealism of Robert Gober. Though these works by Velozo may not seem to confront disability, they hint at the anthropomorphized inanimate objects and depersonalized partial bodies that inform the unconscious cultural apprehension of non-normative bodyminds, and from which many disabled, queer, and trans artists draw uncanny energy.

Ear’s Phault, 2016. hydrastone, concrete pigment, styrofoam, plastic, shoe foam, paint, wood, steel. 27” x 40” x 20"

Finally (and most enigmatically for me, since I didn’t get to discuss them at length with Velozo), are their facilitation projects. Lean (2020) appears to be a group exercise based around devices designed for two people to wear while facing one another and leaning back, delicately supporting each other’s weight with the resistance offered by the device. Echo and Resonance Pedagogical Prop (2019) is an interactive sculpture where viewers wet a finger to play singing glasses. Moving in Nonlinear Time (2018) was a scored group event in which pairs of people seem to have engaged in performative collaborative drawing based on creating expressive timelines. And also from 2018, their participatory lecture Proposing a Possible Subject encouraged each participant to respond to a sculpture with creative drawing “to form a new structure”, on a clipboard holding a nonlinear chart of words and curved lines. Some of their most recent curricular work, however, has been collaborative. Focused on their work as a teaching artist in K-12 settings, they helped to create a concise and highly generative inclusive guide to teaching with and about work by disabled practitioners in a range of visual and performing art forms.

Moving in Nonlinear Times, 2 hour facilitation, texts, plastic sheeting, ink, markers, charcoal, paper. 2018

Even considered in retrospective fragments, Velozo’s pedagogical works underscore themes of formal lucidity and symbolic economy that recur throughout their work. While they spoke eloquently and convincingly to me of their “crip rage”, the overall tone of their artwork, as well as of their personal demeanor, is of playful warmth and responsive sociality. Along with their consistent affirmation of principles around mutuality, consent, care, and accountability, they display the essential qualities of a capable and responsible leader, organizer, and facilitator. At this spring's online disability symposium at Illinois State University (my last post on this blog), Velozo said, “So often we are relegated to the literal margins, and part of that is just the imagination of space and architecture… It's also almost never a pro-social or a social disability model.” Through their leadership in the community-based group Baltimore City of Accessible Arts, as well as their work on inclusive teaching with Growing Inclusivity for Vibrant Engagement, Velozo offers a different model, with their clear and strong voice insisting on bringing disabled bodyminds and artwork out of dark corners and into the visible center of cultural discourse.

Proposing a Possible Subject: Participatory Lecture. Storm King Sculpture Center. 50 minute facilitation. open drawings, clipboards, pencils, charcoal, cue cards. 2018