Tura Oliveira | I Saw God and She Wasn’t Made of Money (2021)
Video (4:03): Tura Oliveira is a multidisciplinary artist who work involves craft materials and processes including textiles, beadwork, and embroidery. In this video she takes us through her 2021 exhibition at BRIC’s Project Room in Brooklyn New York.
Excerpt from the video description, ‘Tura Oliveira positions labor and desire as tools to access the divine, creating textiles that act as portals into a queer, sci-fi utopia informed by the anarchist utopias of Octavia Butler and Ursula K. LeGuin, and Latinx leftist art. I Saw God and She Wasn’t Made of Money transforms BRIC’s Project Room into a devotional space using embroidery, quilting, beading, and rug tufting. The blending of disparate materials into a patchworked whole serves as a metaphor for the Buddhist understanding of dependent origination, that our lives and consciousness do not exist on its own and are always interconnected.
Oliveira’s hand-dyed silk quilts are layered, mythological narratives that are influenced by and celebratory of the many forms of contemporary intentional communities: the radical action and aesthetics of Chile’s Arpilleristas; the world building narratives of queer Star Trek slash fiction zines; the subterranean temples at Damanhur. Influenced by Mexican muralism, Oliveira uses allegory as a narrative tool and embeds within her textiles stories of collective imagining, elasticizing our perception of our present, and the possibility of a future without the limiting borders and boundaries of colonialism and the binaries of heteronormativity.’ — BRIC TV
About Tura Oliviera
BRIC TV writes, ‘Tura Oliveira is a multidisciplinary artist who work involves craft materials and processes including textiles, beadwork, and embroidery. She was a 2018 BRIClab resident and the winner of BRIC’s ArtFP in 2020 with an exhibition opeing in January 2021. Oliveira received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI. She has participated in group exhibitions at Brooklyn Brush Studios and the Space Heater Gallery, both in Brooklyn; and at SPRING/BREAK, SLEEPCENTER, and the Museum of Arts and Design, all in NY. She has been awarded residencies at the Museum of Arts and Design, WaveHill, and Ars Nova, all in NY; A.I.R Gallery, Governors Island, NY; and Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY. (E.M.)’
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