Joseph Liatela ’22 Presents His First Solo Museum Exhibition ‘Nothing Under Heaven’
Joseph Liatela ’22 presents Nothing Under Heaven at The Montclair State University Galleries this fall, marking his first solo museum show. Liatela is currently an artist in residence in Smack Mellon Studio Program in DUMBO.
Nothing Under Heaven, curated by Jesse Bandler Firestone, shows both new commissions and previous works with a single theme: the need for connection, pleasure, and agency within oppressive systems. The exhibition weaves spaces of gathering–such as the church, nightclub, and hospital waiting room–where promises of salvation and healing blend with alienation, loss, and grief.
“It is about how these shared architectural and social spaces shape the ways we perceive ourselves and one another, and how bodies hold and repurpose history," Liatela said. "For example, the dance floor can be a place to dance with loved ones who have passed on, and a gesture can reach across decades and cast into the future.”
Liatela’s work is positioned in tandem with a painting of Archangel Gabriel by Carlo Dolci from 1660 and a polaroid from Warhol from the 1970s. Two of his sculptures also include Catholic objects from the 1800s. “There are many decades (centuries) in the room, as well as chosen queer ancestors. Archangel Gabriel has been depicted as many genders across time in religious art,” he said.
According to Liatela, the exhibition also deals with absence, something that implies both a loss and potential. “Faith requires absence. It is about how the spaces in between–the portal and the threshold–are the most stable architectures we have to work with. And lastly, this work is about making the things that you need. Resolving your own wounds (that may be shared, inherited, collective) outside of one's own body, and making your own medicine that is the work. Creating what you needed because it didn’t exist before–there was a gap (a portal) akin to the space between decades, generations, realms, an empty stage at a gay bar, or the space between works next to one another in a gallery.”
The exhibition will run through December 9, 2022 at the University Galleries’ newly reconfigured flagship exhibition space, the George Segal Gallery.
Joseph Liatela is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York City. Using performance, sculpture, and video, he makes work that examines issues of biopolitics, institutional power, trans and queer subjectivities, surveillance, collective movement, projection, and embodiment. Liatela’s work has been included in exhibitions for Denniston Hill (Woodridge, NY), Human Resources LA (Los Angeles, CA), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (Los Angeles, CA), SOMArts (San Francisco, CA), Paul Robeson Galleries at Rutgers University (Newark, NJ), Field Projects (New York, NY), Trestle Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), The Monmouth Museum (Lincroft, NJ), Hubble Street Galleries (San Francisco, CA), Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space (New York, NY), BRIC (Brooklyn, NY), PS122 Gallery (New York, NY), Stellar Projects (New York, NY), Proyecto Galería (Mexico City, CDMX), SUM Gallery (Vancouver, BC), among others. Liatela’s work has been featured in Artsy, The Leslie Lohman Museum Journal, SF MoMA’s Open Space, KQED Arts, Strange Fire Collective, Revista De La Universidad De México, The East Bay Express, ArtNews, Hyperallergic, Artforum, and Art & Education. He has attended residencies at Signal Fire Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Wassaic Project, Denniston Hill, The Kala Institute, and The Banff Centre. He is a recipient of awards and fellowships from the Zellerbach Family Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, The Wassaic Project, Denniston Hill, California College of the Arts, Columbia University, and the Banff Centre.