I Saw God and She Wasn’t Made of Money

I Saw God and She Wasn’t Made of Money

Installation with handmade quilts, jacquard weaving, hand dyed silk charmeuse and silk
velvet, murals
2021
BRIC, Brooklyn, NY

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 capitalism and the binaries of heteronormativity.

– curator Jennifer Gerow