Joseph Liatela Artist Lecture and Embodied Movement Workshop

Joseph Liatela is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, performance, and installation. He will speak about his practice and how he evokes spaces of nightlife, religion, and memorial as sites of communal power and struggle, joy and anguish, acceptance and salvation, and most of all, remembrance. With a background in printmaking and sculpture, ephemera and trace are central components to Liatela’s practice.

Those whose histories have been excluded from the official archive must often look to the traces left behind in order to unearth one’s lineages. Alternative forms of citation and narrative–such as memory and performance–become how one orients oneself within a larger collective history. Tracing these ephemeral threads allows for the weaving of alternate lifeworlds. Through employing the visual languages of cultural spaces of simultaneous belonging and alienation, as well as the implied presence of an absence, Liatela aims to expand the definition of the sacred to include the architectures, bodies, and relationships it is rarely attributed to.

After the talk there will be a participatory component to collaboratively explore these ideas in movement, together.

This event is open to the public.