Emily Velez Nelms

Lives and works in Miami & New York

Artist statement

Emily Velez Nelms is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, performance, film, and architecture. She constructs immersive environments that examine how bodies and constructed landscapes become entangled in systems of desire, consumption, and power. By shifting the gaze, her work reveals how people and places are experienced, removing the neutrality from the act of perception. South Florida provides the geographic and conceptual foundation of Velez Nelms' practice—a landscape where tourism, ecological intervention, and colonial histories have constructed a distinctive regional identity. Her ongoing body of work considers ecosystems as living structures shaped by these forces. Water is a recurring subject throughout her practice. Its ecological behaviors and connection to South Florida's coastal histories provide a framework for understanding how geography, ecology, and human intervention continually reshape one another. Over the past decade, Velez Nelms has developed an expanding body of immersive installations that construct psychosomatic environments. Toward a Referendum on Performativity (2019) critiques the exploitative structures that have historically demanded performance from racialized bodies in public space, exposing the spatial and social choreography of spectatorship that has long entertained the American public. Let My Understandings At Times Allow Me To Rest Awhile (2024) holds divine vision alongside earthly fatigue, reflecting on...

Artwork