Fharid LaTorre

Lives and works in Miami, FL and New York, NY

Artist statement

Fharid LaTorre (b. 1999) is an American sculptor raised at the edge of the Everglades, living between Miami and New York. He graduated with a BFA from The Cooper Union in 2022 I make sculptures, images and sound works in which a body, or something standing in for one, is held in place. I carve wood, often burl, cast and fabricate metal, and join these forms to apparatus: fixators, a retractor, clamps, frames, a conveyor mechanism, transducers. Some of this hardware comes from clinical and industrial suppliers; some I modify or build. The structures that hold a form up also hold it still, and my work stays on the thin line between support and restraint. I am less interested in a system pressing on a body from outside than in a body that has taken the system in and keeps itself in shape. My own process belongs to this: long hours of carving and fixing, repetition, precision. I work until a form reads less as something designed than as something that has adapted. Materials arrive with histories, biological or industrial, and I follow what happens when a form passes between them: from wood to metal, from image to belt, from object to vibration. Recent works use sound and other technical means to shape how a form is perceived. My titles come from passing my own writing through repeated translation. They act on the work from outside.

Artwork