JOSEPH LIATELA
From Catholic Spectacle to Queer Ritual
PORTRAITS BY CYLE SUESZ
ARTWORKS BY JOSEPH LIATELA
TEXT BY TYLER AKERS
To purchase issue 22, featuring this story, please visit here.
When he began carving a massive angel wing as a tribute to his chosen mother Cecilia Gentili in 2023, artist Joseph Liatela didn’t know it would turn into a memorial only a few months later. “She never got to see it,” he regrets, “at least not in her physical form.” Many of Liatela’s projects invoke the power of intergenerational relationships and the role of art and artist as intercessors working between life and death. He is often looking for traces left in the margins, interested by the notion of what does or doesn’t make it into the official archive — or what he calls “the presence of an absence.”
In this spirit, his work tends to strike a balance of binary themes: care and loss, belonging and alienation. “I like the idea of encoding histories that may be vulnerable to powers that aim to make them disappear,” he explains. Each work begins with an idea and develops in form accordingly, frequently relying on esoteric or underground signs and symbols legible to the initiated (if you know, you know) — veiling and revealing meaning to particular audiences simultaneously.
