Los Angeles based artists rafa esparza and Timo Fahler will give a lecture focusing on collaboration and experimentation within their shared and individual artistic practices. The artists will present examples of past projects initiated together, participated in jointly, and undertaken respectively with other collaborators leading up to their forthcoming project were-:NENETECH FORMS presented at MOCA Tucson and the University of Arizona’s Joseph Gross Gallery.
The artists will be in dialogue with students from the University of Arizona, who will collectively intervene in the architecture of the Joseph Gross Gallery by building adobe “support structures.” The Gallery will become a laboratory for discussion and experimentation, with students conceiving of their own artistic contributions to the installation there or supporting the parallel project at MOCA over the course of the fall. Additional contributing artists, writers, scholars, and scientists will be invited into the conversations that shape and enliven the dual exhibitions, weaving together a multivalent conversation about adaptation, bi-nationality, and survival in the Sonoran Desert.
rafa esparza (b. 1981, Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work reveals his interests in history, personal narratives, and kinship, his own relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that it produces. Using live performance as his main form of inquiry, esparza employs site-specificity, materiality, memory, and what he calls (non)documentation as primary tools to investigate and expose ideologies, power structures, and binary forms of identity thatestablish narratives, history, and social environments. He has exhibited work at internationally recognized museums such as the Whitney, MASS MoCA, and the Hammer Museum. He was the Wanlass Resident at Occidental College and has lectured at UCSD, SAIC, CalArts, and Colombia in 2020 alone.
Timo Fahler (b. 1978, Tulsa; Los Angeles-based) uses plaster, ceramics, steel, wood, and found objects to construct highly visual and culturally significant works. Combining formal elements of sculpture with references to his Mexican heritage, Fahler’s work explores ideas of use and reuse through casting and manipulating found objects and combining them with relics that relate to personal experiences. His restructuring of objects in a manner that indicates function and meaning while remaining abstract in form, invokes a bricoleurian practice evident in Mexican culture, yet representative of a multi-cultural aesthetic. He received his MFA from UCLA and his BFA from the Kansas City Arts Institute. He has created exhibitions that travel and explore the narrative of creative communities on the periphery across the United States, led youth programs at the Ramón C. Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts and guest lectured at the Kansas City Art Institute, SAIC, and PAOS aninternational non-profit art incubator in Guadalajara, MX.
The School of Art focuses on bringing renowned and diverse artists and scholars from around the world to our campus. These visitors bring their own unique influences to the program by engaging with community members, students, and faculty through salons, lectures, and exhibitions.