A pioneer in video art, Vâelez, together with Gary Hill and Bill Viola, was at the forefront of the generation that established video as an art form in the 1970s.

Educated at the University of Puerto Rico, where he was influenced by Marshal McLuhan, Vâelez subsequently moved to New York where he studied at Global Village. Vâelez has been credited with the development of "a new transequential language of representation," in which multiple scenes are superimposed and juxtaposed within the frame. In this respect, Vâelez's production notes on his video pieces provide a unique and invaluable resource on how he was able to make these advances using analog formats -- nearly a decade before digital formats made layered imagery a standard practice in video production. In his numerous videos, Vâelez has explored other cultures -- from the Cuna Indians of Panama to the Butoh dancers of Japan -- using his unique video aesthetic and language to explore intercultural dialogue and self-reflexive ethnography. Above all, Vâelez's videos attest to the impossibility of a one-to-one translation across cultural boundaries. (Extracted from notes by Chon Noriega, Dept. of Film and Television, UCLA)

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