COMMISSION #12 – TURA OLIVEIRA
More than any other interpretation presented so far, Tura Oliveira 's IUNO reveals the monstrous and fierce face of Juno.
Her features not only illustrate her feral character, and her bond with the animal world, but also associate the deity with an otherworldly, even extraterrestrial nature.
The humanoid head features a series of protrusions borrowed from Klingons, a fictional population belonging to the Star Trek universe, that testify about her alien origin. Her proportions evoke those of a giant astral body fallen on Earth, echoing on the other hand the monumentality and decay of the imperial colossus.
Seductive and terrifying, the creature embodies the portentous and merciless, sometimes lethal nature of Juno: like the Hindu Kali and the Babylonian Tiamat, she is destructive and motherly, embodying chaos as well as regeneration.
The duality that generally characterizes the Goddess, doesn’t exhaust the complexity that the figure suggests. The metamorphosis she underwent erodes all classifications, whether natural, psychological or gendered, such that future mutations cannot be excluded, let alone predicted.
The sinuosity of her hair, as well as the features of her face, allow us to imagine similar characteristics for her body, perhaps completed by non-human limbs or components. Such a perspective would also enable a further archeological interpretation, as if she stemmed from a Roman grotesque, a phantasmagorical composition seamlessly merging human, animal and vegetal forms. Her body, alien to any law of invariability, resembles the grotesques frescoed on the walls of Roman domus, decorations that seamlessly blend human, animal and plant organisims, giving rise to phantasmagorical compositions.
Like such images, negatively judged by Vitruvius because of their implausibility, Oliveira's IUNO seems to come from a weird, supernatural universe, ruled by laws other than those of our planet and immune from any confining identity categorization.
Tura Oliveira, Reliquary Bust of a Female Saint, 2024, epoxy clay over armature.
Text by Giulia Gaibisso
Tura Oliveira (b..1990, Fall River, MA, U.S.) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. Oliveira holds an MFA from Yale School of Art and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2023, they received the Dean’s Prize from Yale School of Art, a public art commission from the City of New York, and the Abbey Awards fellowship at the British School at Rome. They have been awarded fellowships and grants from NYFA, BRIC, The Museum of Arts and Design, Wave Hill, Ars Nova, A.I.R Gallery, Yaddo, and the Tides Institute.