Denton-based new media artist Julie Libersat transforms everyday roadside objects into installations that challenge how we navigate public space, belonging, and access.
Denton, Texas / julielibersat.com / @julibers
For artist Julie Libersat, the goal is getting lost.
Within her installations, you may spot common roadside objects such as traffic signs, stanchions, barriers, brake lights, flags, and netting. By utilizing motifs of navigation, the Denton-based new media artist explores how the public space surrounding transportation systems reflects our personal and collective histories and values.
In her performance piece Safety Moves (2024), in collaboration with Naomi Kliewer, Libersat barricades the street in a jungle of traffic barriers. Performers clad in orange vests, rubber gloves, and plastic facial shields “direct” pedestrian traffic—that is, waving and pointing safety flags every which way. Her immersive, interactive, and sometimes participatory environments are familiar but disorienting—calling attention to the nuanced realities of the cities, neighborhoods, and communal spaces that we navigate daily.
The fluorescent orange color (coined “Safety Orange” by the National Safety Congress in the 1950s) Libersat so often uses in her work is tiresomely familiar. In Texas, construction work on major roads and highways seems to be our default state of existence as population growth and traffic volumes demand constant expansion. Many of us joke that we cannot remember a time when our routine stretch of Interstate 35 wasn’t under construction. These safety symbols and objects, all bearing that bright orange color, have become an inherent part of our daily landscape, representing a public infrastructure, and community, that is rapidly evolving.
Libersat’s practice challenges us to consider the way public space is socially and culturally produced and manipulated. What subliminal messages are communicated through our perceptions and navigations of the built environment? How does recontextualizing these everyday objects guide our collective understanding of topics of restriction, access, and belonging? Libersat’s work asks which bodies are safe where, challenging who public space privileges and who it might endanger.
