Joseph Liatela is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York City. Using sculpture, performance, and video, he makes work examining issues of biopolitics, memorial, trans and queer subjectivities, and collective movement. 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.

Joseph Liatela is an interdisciplinary artist who examines issues of biopolitics, institutional power, queer subjectivity, surveillence, and embodiment through performance, sculpture, and video. His background in printmaking fostered an interest in how the manipulation of a surface—such as scars on skin or embossing on paper—alters how it is perceived, and has informed his approach to creating politically grounded, identity-based work. Through a transgender lens, Liatela’s work aims to distinguish between the physiological elements that make up bodily existence, and the social meaning the body takes on in the context of lived experience. In doing so, his work examines the performative nature of identity, demonstrating how it is perceived and enacted at the level of the body. -- Joseph Liatela is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York City. Using sculpture, performance, and video, he examines issues of biopolitics, institutional power, queer subjectivity, surveillence, collective movement, and embodiment. He has exhibited at Denniston Hill, LACE, Human Resources Los Angeles, Field Projects, Monmouth Museum, BRIC, EFA Project Space, Stellar Projects, SUM Gallery, and PS122 Gallery, among others. Liatela’s work has been featured in Hyperallergic, Art & Education, Artforum, Leslie-Lohman Museum Journal, KQED Arts, Strange Fire Collective, Revista De La Universidad De México, SFMoMA Open Space, EMERGENCY Index, and Artsy, among others. He has received fellowships from the Zellerbach Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Wassaic Project, Denniston Hill, California College of the Arts, Banff Centre, and Columbia University.

I am a multidisciplinary artist based in New York City. Through a trans lens, my work explores the institutional, cultural, and medicolegal ideas of what is considered a “correct” body. Using performance, sculpture, and writing, I make work that examines issues of gender representation, biopolitics, embodiment, and questions of authenticity. In my recent work, I have been exploring the medical industrial complex and BDSM’s overlap with transgender and queer identity formation and histories. There are many material parallels with medicine and BDSM — for example, stainless steel, silicone, and latex all have queer and medical associations. The ways medicine and BDSM both intertwine with trans and queer histories are starkly contradictory: medicine continues to be extremely pathologizing for all marginalized bodies, and BDSM has been used in queer communities to imagine utopic spaces for sexual deviance, consensual negotiated power dynamics, and agency. As a transgender person who has roots in BDSM culture and navigates the medical industrial complex in order to access hormones, I’m interested in how both of these spaces have been formative to who I am — as well as the paradoxical relationship of having to rely on a medical system that is oppressive in order to access embodiment.