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.

rafa ezparza

rafa esparza 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 that establish 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

Timo Fahler works with utilitarian mediums and found objects to construct highly visual and culturally significant works. Combining formal elements of sculpture with references to his mixed heritage, Fahler’s work explores ideas of use and reuse through casting and manipulating found objects and combining them with relics and materials that relate to personal experiences. His restructuring of objects in a manner that indicates both function and meaning invokes a bricoleurian practice evident in his midwestern background, and representative of a multi-cultural aesthetic.

2021-2022 Visiting Artists