ABOUT

Through her creative practice, Liss Lafleur examines the ways in which identity and memory are transformed by the shifting boundaries of history and culture. Lafleur’s works include an investigation of retrofuturism, queer theory, the power of language, and the spiritual relationship between technology and the self.

In recent projects she asks: How are stories shared or silenced, and why? How might technology operate as performance, and how might it be used to create new forms of narrative? Can her identity be expressed as an aesthetic quality?

Film and television allows experiences to be contained, labeled, and experienced at will. In early projects, she began staging, and re-organizing found text and footage to address how meaning is created and perceived in what Alison Landsberg best describes as “the private felt, public imagination.” As an artist, Lafleur considers film a form of time travel, moving across temporalities and space, mediating our relationships with each other and history. Within this belief, she uses repetition and duration as a framework for abstraction.

Lafleur’s series, “Tutti Frutti” is an immersive installation that includes; a collection of twenty-two blown glass fruit, scaled to the measurements of her and her mother’s bodies, made while in residence at the Museum of Glass; a series of monographs; and a single channel video projection titled Boi with a Fruit Basket. From Eve’s apple to queer vernacular, Lafleur was inspired to make this work after researching the intersectional ways in which fruit has historically been used to feminize, criminalize, and sexualize the body. Gelatin, a fruit derivative, is a material she returns to often in my work. Gelatin dates back to the 16th century and is tied to the space race, ammunition, the construct of the homemaker, and specific moments in American history.

Liss LaFleur is a transmedia artist based in Texas. Her work broadly explores the relationships between gender, technology, and identity. She is the founder of the Future Feminist Lab and teaches New Media Art and feminist discourse as an Associate Professor in the College of Visual Art and Design at the University of North Texas. Her work has been exhibited and screened nationally and internationally in venues including the TATE Modern (London), the Reykjavik Art Museum (Iceland), the Contemporary Art Museum (Houston, TX), Telematic Media Arts (San Francisco, CA), the Museum of Glass (Seattle, WA), and the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (South Korea).