“Conscience and Consciousness” with Marnie Powers-Torrey, John Halaka, and Joe Yorty

MARNIE POWERS-TORREY

Marnie Powers-Torrey holds an MFA in Photography from the University of Utah and a BA in English and Philosophy from Boston College. Marnie is a librarian at the Marriott Library where she serves as Director of the Book Arts Program & Red Butte Press. She is the faculty mentor for book arts designations and teaches letterpress, bookmaking, artists’ books, and other courses for the Book Arts Program and elsewhere. Marnie identifies primarily as a book artist, and her book work is held in collections across the nation. 

JOHN HALAKA

John Halaka’s art projects incorporate drawing, painting, photography, and oral history. His images serve as visual meditations on experiences of indigenous survival, creative resistance, and cultural persistence in the face of settler-colonial erasure. Halaka’s artwork is produced as a result of an extended personal engagement with marginalized communities and is designed to provide an arena for both the participants and the viewers to meditate on survival and resistance as conditions that shape the life experiences of displaced populations. John Halaka is a Professor of Visual Arts at the University of San Diego, where he has taught since 1991. He received his MFA in the visual arts from the University of Houston in 1983, and his BA in fine arts from the City University of New York Baccalaureate Program, with Brooklyn College as home school. www.johnhalaka.com

JOE YORTY

Joe Yorty is an interdisciplinary artist who employs a range of materials, objects, and methods to make work that largely addresses the anxieties and absurdities of American domestic culture and the pathos of the ceaseless search for fulfillment in the accumulation of things that, to a large extent, defines the American experience in the twenty-first century. Joe was born in southwest Utah, raised in Southern California, served eleven years in the U.S. Navy, and received an MFA in Visual Art at UCSD in 2013. He currently lives and works in San Diego where he serves as the founding Creative Director for the not-for-profit gallery and project space BEST PRACTICE.