Julia Oldham

Julia Oldham is an artist and storyteller who was raised by a physicist, a rock hound and a pack of dogs in rural Maryland. Born the same year as the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, Oldham has been consumed by scientific curiosity her entire life, and has sought through her work to understand the unknowable and transcend humanness. She blends digital media and drawing to tell stories that she finds both troubling and beautiful, ranging from the historical tale of Laika the Soviet Space Dog’s journey into orbit to science fiction visions of a post-apocalyptic future world populated by high-tech chihuahuas. She frequently collaborates with scientists and finds hidden love stories in particle physics and theoretical mathematics, and ghost stories in wetland ecology. Oldham builds her alternate realities by combining photography and video with fantastical hand-drawn characters and landscapes; and this process results in work that rides a fine line between the real and unreal.

Julia Oldham’s work has been screened/exhibited at Art in General in New York, NY; MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, NY; the Northwest Film Center at the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; the San Diego Art Institute, San Diego, CA; PPOW in New York, NY; The Drawing Center in New York, NY; The Bronx Museum of Art in the Bronx, NY; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, IL; Disjecta, Portland, OR; the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA; the Dia Foundation at the Hispanic Society in New York, NY; the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC; and Nunnery Gallery in London, UK; and she was included in the 2016 Portland Biennial curated by Michelle Grabner. Her work has been supported by Artadia, the Fund for Art and Dialogue, New York, NY; NYC Urban Field Station, Queens, NY; Artist in the Marketplace at the Bronx Museum of Art, Bronx, NY; Art in General, New York, NY; the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in New York, NY; Outpost Artist Resources in Ridgewood, NY; Artists in Residence in the Everglades, Miami, FL; Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest, Clermont, KY; the Oregon Arts Commission in Portland, OR; and the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, Chicago, IL.