Emily Oliveira (oh-lee-VAY-rah): Painting/Printmaking MFA '23

My practice incorporates sculpture, performance, video, and installation, while remaining rooted in the sensual materiality and inescapable politics of cloth. The allegorical images and intersecting narratives are influenced by science fiction and Mexican muralism; I view my work within the lineage of Latin American textile art, and queer craft, reflecting their shared appetite for bricolage, narrative, and syncretism.

In my quilts and sculptures, I use my own hand-dyed and mono-printed fabrics; the colors blur and meld together unpredictably, recalling the blurring and dissolution of borders and binaries. Figurative cyanotypes on silk emphasize the fragility and the temporality of the quilts as permeable membranes.

The roadmaps to utopia in my work are non-linear, frequently doubling back on themselves; the figures and textile objects have an amphibious relationship to being and not-yet- being, and temporally separate events occur simultaneously in the picture plane. My works are portals, thin veils between our world and the world as it might be.

The act of cutting cloth cannot be reversed, only mended, and quilting is the visual artifact of that cutting and mending, the piecing of fabrics into a disparate but resilient whole: a process that calls to mind collectivism, cosmic making and unmaking, and the interdependence of our lives and consciousnesses. Quilting is a process imbued with both the relational and the divine; personal textile labor for utility and pleasure contrasts sharply with the drudgery of alienated wage labor.

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