Spudnik Press Welcomes Resident Artist João Oliveira

In collaboration with Comfort Station for the international artist exchange project Close to There < > Perto de Lá, João Oliveira will be our Resident Artist during the week of August 11-18.  We are pleased to welcome João and look forward to the prints he will produce at Spudnik. On August 14 please join us for A Conversation with Spudnik Press Resident Artist João Oliveira and Jessica Cochran as they discuss João’s work.

Little amusements: i’m going to love you, hold you, squeeze you, until you’re in tiny pieces is the result of the impression of plastic animals bodies, torn apart by the same method that I used as a child (and experimental medical coroner). After being misplaced and shredded, these animals undergo a heating process, developed by me, to turn them into two-dimensional matrices that I print with the same procedures traditionally used in engraving, resulting in a kind of graphic stain; a unique mark of violence that links the author to his act.”

–João Oliveira, 2019

João Oliveira is a visual artist with a BA in Visual Arts from the Universidade Federal da Bahia (2011), and a Master’s in Creative Process in Visual Arts from the same university (2017). He is trained in lithography and metal engraving through the Workshops at the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia (MAM-BA). He works on the encounter of metal engraving with other supports, appropriating personal experience in order to create works with a forged autobiographical nature, obtained through small rituals of self-fiction.

Close to There < > Perto de Lá is an international artist exchange project between Comfort Station (Chicago, USA) and Projeto Ativa (Salvador, Brazil), in collaboration with Harmonipan (Mexico City, Salvador), made possible by the MacArthur Foundation International Connections Fund. By bringing members of these two artistic communities in proximity with one another, this project aims to gestate long-term artistic collaborations between the participants, share arts-organizing models from their respective socio-political-artistic contexts, and encourage creative discourse around ideas such as the African Diaspora and contemporary Latinx/Latin American identities.

The exchange will begin with a multi-disciplinary group of Salvador-based artists visiting Chicago August 9th – 29th 2019, carrying out a variety of programs, performances, and research through Comfort Station and its partner spaces across the city. In February of 2020, a group of Chicago-based artists will in turn visit Salvador to engage with the city’s creative landscape via Projeto Ativa’s network of artists and cultural institutions.

Learn about all of our upcoming 2019/2020 Resident Artists

Learn about the Spudnik Press Cooperative Residency Program