Wednesday, September 11 @ 5:00 – 6:15pm
Elvehjem L160
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Working in a range of digital media, Julia Oldham visualizes the uneasy collision of nature and technology in a fragile world. She documents extant environments such as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine, clear cut forests in Oregon, and swaths of derelict wilderness in New York City, and she also builds fictional worlds through drawing and animation. With tenderness and humor, Oldham explores her own conflicting feelings about human progress through her narrative works, envisioning speculative futures and exploring scientific history. The final works take the form of short films, video installations and print projects. Her practice is research intensive, frequently involving scientists as collaborators.
Her work has been shown widely, including exhibitions and screenings at the Queens Museum, Queens, New York; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Illinois; and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. She has received support from Artadia, the Fund for Art and Dialogue; NYC Urban Field Station; Artist in the Marketplace at the Bronx Museum of Art; the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council; the Oregon Arts Commission; The Ford Family Foundation; and the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs; and she has participated in artist residencies across the country including Artists in Residence in the Everglades in Everglades National Park, Florida; the Studios at Mass MOCA, North Adams, Massachusetts; Lower East Side Studio Program, Artists Alliance Inc, New York, New York; Swing Space, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York, New York; and Winter Workshop Residency at Wave Hill, Bronx, New York. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, and has been featured on NPR. She lives and works in Eugene, Oregon, USA. juliaoldham.com