Book of Roofs


Josely Carvalho is a Brazilian-born multimedia artist who lives and works in New York City and Rio de Janeiro.

Artist Bio

Book of Roofs is a media/installation project that includes an interactive website and digital video installations. Beginning as conceptual sculptural book art, it consists of a video installation using a truckload of 3,000 clay roof tiles, arranged in repeating patterns upon which digital video images are continuously projected. The Internet is the site of Book of Roofs as an interactive project, allowing a multiplicity of voices organized through a database process to collect a non-linear narrative of experiences, metaphors and thoughts on dwelling. Carvalho works with the concept that architecture is part of everyone’s personal history and shelter is an extension of one’s body. An ongoing project, Book of Roofs has continued to be shown through new sculpture/sound/video/printmaking/photography installations such as Disenchanting Salmu a water sculpture installation about the looting and destruction of archeological sites in Iraq due to the present war. The present work incorporates smells as a protagonist in the installations.


Award Year
2000
Status

Completed

Josely Carvalho

Josely Carvalho

New York, NY

Brazilian-born multimedia artist Josely Carvalho lives and works in New York City and Rio de Janeiro. Her installations incorporate varied technology in the construction of both digital and physical environments, while her provocative web concept Book of Roofs weaves sound, text and images into interactive virtual perspectives on shelter. Carvalho has exhibited internationally and nationally at renowned venues such as Art in General, New York; Pinacoteca de São Paulo; Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo; Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Sao Paulo; Tyler School of Art Gallery, Philadelphia; Kenyon College, Ohio; Casa de Las Americas, Cuba; Casa del Lago, Mexico City; Miami Dade Community College Gallery North, Florida; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, Venezuela. She is represented by Galeria Valu Oria in São Paulo, Brazil. Josely Carvalho has been awarded prestigious grants including the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio International Conference and Research Center residency in Italy, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council for the Arts, Franz Masereel Print Center in Belgium, and a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship, among others.