Queer Spectacle, Polaroid Realities, and the Art of Wrestling with Identity with Christopher Anthony Velasco

In this illuminating episode of What’s My Thesis?, host Javier Proenza welcomes artist and educator Christopher Anthony Velasco—a polymath of performative personas, analog photography, and speculative queer mythologies. Known for his immersive character work and deep engagement with the aesthetics of subversion, Velasco brings an electrifying mix of vulnerability, irreverence, and narrative dissonance to a conversation that resists containment.

Anchored by his long-running alter ego The Doctor, Velasco charts a performative lineage from backyard wrestling and horror cinema to body horror and experimental drag. His work collapses boundaries between art and entertainment, sincerity and satire, fiction and lived experience—what he terms “the art world as a wrestling ring.” Through characters like Krystal Carrington and Doctor Barbie, Velasco reclaims and retools identity through spectacle, queering archetypes from within.

This episode explores:

The influence of Japanese wrestling and horror film on Velasco’s photographic performance work

The metaphysical potential of Polaroids as portals into alternate dimensions

Drag as worldbuilding and trauma alchemy

Navigating academia as a queer artist of color—from community college through CalArts and UC Santa Barbara

Sobriety, creative resilience, and re-emerging with purpose

Velasco speaks candidly about substance use, identity crises, and the emotional minefields of higher education, particularly the lack of institutional support for artists of color. Yet, the episode also brims with humor, warmth, and geeky tangents—from Transformers lore to micro machines, Proenza’s Miami coke-snobbery, and the joys of analog photography.

This conversation is a living archive: disorganized, alive, and expansive. Like Velasco’s art, it makes space for contradiction, chaos, and camp without apology.

Follow Christopher Anthony Velasco on Instagram at @caver83

Hosted by Javier Proenza

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