Faculty

From an early age, Professor Latiano has been both captivated and unnerved by the complexity and scope of our natural world. This fascination has shaped his artistic practice, which centers around the perception of time, space, scale, and our ability to abstractly place ourselves within the larger universe around us.

Prof. Latiano is drawn to how our relatively short life spans affect the way we perceive time, and how the context of the present shapes how we interpret the past and predict the future. Scientific fields that symbolize the passage of time, such as geology, physics, and evolutionary biology, are commonly employed as catalysts in his work. His artwork weaves between science-fact and science-fiction, alluding to the more elusive qualities of our environment, and our own uncertain future on this planet.

Prof. Latiano’s installations explore labor, impermanence, and fragility. Site‐responsiveness and architectural-integration are vital to his practice, appropriating the pre-existing structure of the site as part of the artwork. He strategically focuses on the physical boundaries of his artwork, challenging the lines between where the art ends and the exhibition space begins. The act of building is central to both the final work and his creative process, and much of his artistic practice is dedicated to methodic material manipulation. He is rarely satisfied with things that take him a day to build, and has his best ideas when he is neck-deep in a difficult fabrication problem.

Although Prof. Latiano’s artwork requires a large physical presence in its construction, conceptually, the works hinge on fragility and impermanence. The lifecycles of his individual works have become crucial to his practice. The art exists for the duration of its exhibition, and then it does not. There is an unsettling bite to that impermanence, but also intense weight and beauty.