My Creative Hero: Lia Halloran

Seth Josephson is an executive producer and artist at Frame48, an animation and post-production studio in Culver City, CA. He has created art pieces and produced work for a wide variety of clients, including musicians Melanie Martinez, Anderson .Paak, Muse, and brands, including Microsoft, AB InBev, Samsung, and Shimano. His background in contemporary art and visual effects greatly influence his producing style and make him a key creative and technical resource for the directors and clients he works with.

LBB> Who would you say is your creative hero? 

Seth> My creative hero, without any doubt in my mind, is Lia Halloran. I’ve had many creative influences over the years, but no one has been as formative to my creative process and outlook on art as her. 

Lia is a globally renowned interdisciplinary artist whose work frequently explores scientific concepts and how they relate to body and self. Her work, in my eyes, is expansive and mesmerising, and frequently drives me to look up her process for each piece, which inevitably leads to a deeper understanding of both the work, the world around me, and Lia herself. Her work has been represented, shown, and published globally. If you’ve been through terminals one or three at LAX in the last year, you’ve most likely stopped to marvel at some of it.

Terminal 1 installation of Lia Halloran’s Your Body Is a Space That Sees, on view 2021-2023.

LBB> How long has this person been important to you and what are your first memories of meeting them or coming across their work?

Seth> I first met Lia when I was an undergrad at Chapman University. I was denied admission from the graphic design department, but given a hefty scholarship and financial aid to attend the business school, so needless to say, I was looking to take as many art credits as I was allowed. 

At the time, I was an eager but under-trained painter, so I enrolled in Lia’s intro to painting course. That is when I first saw her work. I remember looking up to her techniques, her knowledge of art history and technical knowledge of the medium itself, and of course, the work that she could produce with that knowledge. Her paintings evoked motion and inertia, like a snapshot of a film from a camera that could see gravity and light waves beyond the visible spectrum. I wanted to make work like that.

The Magnetism, Push - Lia Halloran - 2006 - from The World is Bound in Secret Knots

The other series that inspired me early on was Dark Skate, a long exposure photographic series of light bending through deserted landmarks. They are tantalising and ghostly, but filled with motion, created by a light attached to Lia’s body as she skateboarded through the scene. As a skater myself, this was inspirational. Seeing an artist use that side of herself in her work was encouraging, and opened my eyes to how my seemingly unrelated passions could not just impact my work as an artist, but provide foundations for it.

Marine Stadium Corridor -  Lia Halloran - 2008 - from Dark Skate Miami 

LBB> If it’s someone you personally know, how did you get to know them and how has your relationship evolved over the years? If you don’t know this person, how did you go about finding to learn more about them and their work?

Seth> After that initial course, I took every class I could with Lia, culminating in a course called the Intersection of Art and Science, which was a hybrid of studio art and field work. To this day, I have no idea how she did it (I should have asked), but we were given access to the JPL (NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory) campus every other week to talk with scientists, see what they were working on, and create projects based on their science. We received face-to-face time with the Curiosity Rover’s twin, an in-depth look at future controls for unmanned craft, and most importantly, facetime with the brilliant minds guiding all of JPL’s future science missions.

As a 21 year old anxiety ridden student, I’m not sure I had the awareness to realise how beneficial this would be to me in the future. I was merely caught up in the coolness factor of being able to participate. However, after catching up with Lia recently, she explained her principal motivation for the class was not just to expose us to these scientific understandings, but to break down the potential insecurities we might have as artists when approaching complex concepts. She wanted us to know we had something to contribute, a voice, to the brilliant people standing in front of us.

LBB> Why is the person such an inspiration to you? 

Seth> Ultimately, that reasoning is why Lia is an inspiration for me. She has a wide breadth of knowledge, a diverse set of passions, and the eagerness, not just to share them with others, but to help others break down barriers between their own passions. Her ethos that she passed on to me almost 10 years ago was that curiosity is the most important value to nurture. It is the foundational quality that leads to better work, growth, and a more fulfilling life.

In the midst of figuring out what the hell I was doing as a business major, I discovered that the university I was attending had one of the best film programs in the world, and transferred into the producing program. I’m not sure I would have survived the production management, film finance, and distribution classes without knowing that I had an artistic safe-haven across campus in Lia’s studio.

When it came time to dump myself into the real world, I didn’t have the financial safety net to work unpaid internships or minimum wage mailroom jobs, so I inevitably ended up producing in the commercial world, holding on to that curious flame for dear life while I bid out corporate web content and conference material. Luckily I held onto it until I reconnected my current business partners at Frame48, Tom Teller, and Julian Conner, and over time, that curious flame became our core ethos as a creative team. While it wasn’t so well defined at the offset, we realised that curiosity was the core trait that made each of us so good at our chosen pillars of artistic expression.

Over time I split my attention between producing and compositing, an often overlooked and tedious portion of the post production pipeline. However, I took great pride in developing it as an art form and marvelled at the vastness of information I could add to my artistic arsenal. Most of the creative work I do now is technical in nature, and requires a strong foundational understanding of how and why things work, but that’s what makes it continuously interesting. I think I owe a large portion of that mindset to both Lia’s set example as an artist, and her teaching as a professor.

On top of that mindset as a creative, as executives, we put curiosity first and foremost as a quality when building a team. There are a plethora of other qualities that make someone a good person to work with and a valuable member of a cohesive and tight-knit team, but the most important to growth and development is curiosity and the willingness to admit what you don’t know.

LBB> What piece or pieces of this person’s work do you keep coming back to and why?

Seth> I think I will always have an affinity for the first series I saw of Lia’s, The World is Bound in Secret Knots. The ambition and execution of this series is a massive testament to Lia’s process and thoughtfulness as an artist. How do you represent the properties of inertia, gravity, and the other invisible forces that affect our bodies in every waking moment? How do you evoke that as a feeling in the observer when they look at the work? I think about this series a lot when working with complex concepts, and going back to look at the end result is a solid reminder to trust the process of exploration and experimentation.

Momentum with Purple Boundary - Lia Halloran - 2006 - from The World is Bound in Secret Knots

I would be remiss if I also didn’t mention my obsession with Lia’s explorations of astronomy and astronomical history in her series, Your Body is A Space That Sees and her recent piece, Black Sun, Shadow Moon. Both the series and this piece contain so much love, detail, and attention to process, while paying homage to the female scientists that made our current understanding of astronomy possible. 

Black Sun, Shadow Moon - Lia Halloran - 2022 - at META’s Phase 1 building

When we caught up recently, I asked her about these pieces, their scale, and the process. How do you pack not only so much detail, but so much history and science into a 2D piece? Her response was to bring up a quote featured in Dave Hickey’s Air Guitar from Edward Ruscha. In Ruscha’s case, he wanted “...the subtle jolt of visual defamiliarization as a prelude to delight.” or “Wow? What is that!” versus “What is that? Wow!” However, Lia’s intention is the opposite. She uses the massive set of tools at her disposal to make the viewer immediately enamoured with what they are looking at, before asking, “Wait, what am I looking at?” From there begins the deeper understanding of the piece and the history behind it. It’s a process that, in my mind, is a direct contradiction to the general current state of gallery work, where the prerequisite to engage with the work is an MFA in art history.

Observing Lia’s work in person is akin to seeing the centre of the milky way on a clear desert night sky, pointing to a cluster of stars, and wondering how they were formed.

Paper Dolls - Lia Halloran - 2016 - from Your Body is a Space that Sees