Meet the Artists: Session 3
Emily Velez Nelms, Marcelo Canevari and Matthew David Rahming
Emily, Marcelo, and Matthew will be in residence at Fountainhead from April 2 to 30, 2025. Their residency programs are sponsored in part by Lois Whitman Hess and Eliot Hess, and the Central Bank of the Bahamas.
Emily Velez Nelms
Emily Velez Nelms is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans installation, film, sound, and architectural processes. She focuses on phenomenology, the cultural landscape of her upbringing in southern Florida, and the interplay of interiority and intuition. Her practice explores how social structures shape spatial reality, and she deliberately avoids strict disciplinary boundaries. Born and raised in southern Florida, Velez Nelms earned her BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design, her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her MED from the Yale School of Architecture. Her work often employs the architectural method of iteration, using series of maquettes to develop ideas while embracing flux towards a finalized visual language. This conceptual approach is deeply rooted in her MED thesis on southern Florida tourism and its relationship to performance. Her work delves into themes like the functions of looking, visual excess, voyeurism, and the mechanisms of seeing and being seen, often reflecting upon Roland Barthes concept of the punctum.
One of her long-term projects, "Domestic Exotic," blends costume, performance, film, and archival research to document her grandmother’s labor as a cultural producer and belly dancer in Miami during the late 1960s and 70s. This project extends her broader research on Florida's cultural tourist attractions from the 1950s to the present day, exploring the politics of body, land, and development. During her time at Yale, Velez Nelms opened her first museum show, "The Resonance of Things Unseen," at the Yale Peabody Museum, running from April 4 through the end of November. She also co-organized a conference titled "The Global History of Indigenous Thought" as the graduate coordinator for the Yale Group for the Study of Native America, which was the largest gathering of Indigenous leaders and thinkers in the University’s history over a three day period.
Marcelo Canevari
Born and currently based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, artist Marcelo Canevari got his start at the age of sixteen working as an assistant to his father, a scientific illustrator, where he learned to represent plants and animals with scientific accuracy. Since 2017, he has explored a personal art practice, creating open-ended paintings that flirt with ideas of mystery and the uncanny, leaving interpretations up to the viewer. imagination.In 2019, his first solo exhibition, "Our Last Camp," debuted at Espacio Matienschon, Club Cultural Matienzo. His work has also been exhibited by Galería Praxis, Galería MC (Buenos Aires), Mindy Solomon (Miami), Allouche Gallery (NY), Seefood room (Hong Kong), Im Gallery (Guangzhou), and Weserhalle (Berlin). His works were selected for the XI National Painting Award Banco Central, the 13th and 14th UADE National Contest of Visual Arts, and the UNNE Prize.
Matthew David Rahming
Inspired by abstract-expressionists, Matthew David Rahming's practice is anchored around introspection and observation. Born in 1997 in the Bahamas, Rahming's work carries contradictions. Undercurrents and overtones of violence and fragility are layered with gentle mediations and reflections of the diligent persistence of life. His choice of materials and symbols serves to stretch the inherent tensions present in the work, framing the perspective of the audience and acting as a direct extension of his interpolation of his environment.
