Josely Carvalho

PROVENANCE: Courtesy of the Artist

Maskharah03 was part of a solo exhibition entitled Territórios Brancos / White Territories at Valu Oria Gallery in São Paulo in 2007.   I like to think I use the camera as an extension of my printmaking process. The camera in this series embodies the role of the silk-screen frame creating undefined layers between myself and the subject. I see masks as symbolic objects of our performance in the theater of life.

Josely Carvalho is a multimedia artist, born in São Paulo and maintains studios in Rio de Janeiro and New York. In the last four decades, her artwork embraces several mediums and seeks to highlight memory, identity, women issues and social justice while consistently challenges frontiers between artist and public and art and politics.

Her present project Diary of Smells, is an on-going cross-disciplinary series of works where olfaction, a powerful connector to memory and emotions, is a protagonist among other typically dominant components in contemporary art. In 2019, she received the International Art and Olfaction Sadakichi Award in experimental olfactory artwork category for her installation Glass Ceiling: Resilience presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art in São Paulo in 2018.

Among her grants are Pollock-Krasner Foundation; Frans Masereel Print Center, Kasterlee, Belgium; New York State Council for the Arts; Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center Residency; Rockefeller Foundation`s Bellagio International Conference and Research Center Residency, Italy; New York Foundation for the Arts; National Endowment for the Arts, Her pioneer internet project, Book of Roofs/ Livro das Telhas [www.bookofroofs.com], from 1999, received Creative Capital Foundation grant.

Diary of Images, a monograph with color reproductions, poems by the artist and critical texts written by Lucy Lippard, Julia P. Herzberg, Ana Mae Barbosa, Ivo Mesquita, Paulo Herkenhoff, among others, was published by Contra Capa Editora of Rio de Janeiro in 2018.