Online Residency 2022
Biography
Velvet Zoé Ramos (b. 1988, USA)
Is an interdisciplinary visual Artist living and working in Aruba. Her work focuses on how we relate to one another and ourselves by exploring human mechanisms such as empathy, memory and constructions of narratives. Ramos uses a wide range of techniques, from print-making to video works and touches on themes like social and economic imbalance, human mobility (migration), representation, and nostalgia.
Ramos graduated in 2011 with a BA Honours in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, London, UK. Ramos has participated in several exhibitions as well as site-specific and community projects. This year she is a selected artist representing Aruba at 19th Asian Biennale Bangladesh.
Artist Statement
Velvet Zoé Ramos is an interdisciplinary artist working in installations, printmaking, drawing, video, performance, and happenings.
Ramos’s installations have a performative aspect, she becomes the narrator and sets-up a visual stage. The scenarios often present daily survival and social-economical and ecological issues. Ramos deliberately utilizes objects from domestic environments to create a casual and homely impression. The audiences become either onlookers or participants. Their action or non-action refers to the human behavior of the witness and the bystander.
Ramos explores the notions of the multifaceted construct of empathy, ‘the Other’, evolving from the conditions of memory, imagination, riddles, and play. She immerses herself in narratives, estrangement effect, and gestus as methods to social imagination in subversion to her introspective implications and re-appropriation.
Ramos’s artistic endeavor is to resist her despondency, inexperience, and passiveness through a poetic process that tries to keep both the subject and the narrator alive.
*My practice encompasses Installation, printmaking , drawing, performance, relational arts, sculpture, wearables and site-specific art.
I work reflectively through the process of making and experiencing the outcome of said process through audience engagement. I relay the process in exploration of materiality as a narrator and subvert with poetic interpretations of everyday objects.
Links
https://www.instagram.com/artvelvetzr/