Lares Feliciano (b. 1985 Oakland, CA, USA) is an artist, cultural worker, tarot reader, and witch based in the sacred San Luis Valley, Colorado. Feliciano uses animation, installation, and collage to create worlds where diverse stories are front and center and all of time exists at once. Her work explores the in-between, layers of diaspora, and the complexity of memory. She holds an M.F.A in Cinema Production from San Francisco State University and a B.A. in Film & American Studies from Smith College. She has completed residencies with RedLine Contemporary Art Center and Grand Canyon National Park. Recently she completed the Frontier Fellowship with Epicenter in Green River, Utah.
A Bay Area born, Southern raised, mixed-race Puerto Rican, Lares believes in the power of telling our layered stories to both empower and incite change. Lares’ process manifests as a ritual of gathering found materials (archives, ephemera, primary sources), deconstructing their original intention, and finally piecing them together to build new meaning. She draws inspiration from tropes of American identity, particularly the western and the frontier myth. These fixtures of American imagery are foundations in her work for both dissecting the ways otherness is constructed, and creating new heroes to associate with our collective history.
Currently Lares is embarking on a body of work focused on time, specifically human beings' relationship with time and the ways we build meaning through time and space. She is interested in creating experiences where time slows down, turns back, and blends together. Where the participant can microdose time travel through their senses, memory, and imagination. Lares wants to ignite the inner child through playful installations that encourage us all to slow down. In a world of increasing chaos, we owe it to ourselves to slow time.
Feliciano’s films have screened all over the world including San Francisco, Berlin, London, and Melbourne. Her visual art has exhibited at Denver Art Museum, Clyfford Still Museum (Denver), RedLine Contemporary Art Center (Denver), The Storeroom (Denver), Breck Create (Breckenridge) and Pochron Studios (Brooklyn).
Lares Feliciano lives and works in Alamosa, CO.
“My work always begins with collage and the process of gathering images, ephemera, sounds, stories, and other media. In this process I become part witch, part detective, dissecting and deconstructing the materials in front me to create something new. From here collage evolves into installation, animation, murals, and more. I am interested in time, identity, memory, and diaspora. Often in my work, all of time exists at once, setting the viewer off on a sort of sensory time travel. I want viewers to feel pulled into their own nostalgia, empowered to remember and reminisce.”