Tala Oliver Mateo is an interdisciplinary multimedia artist whose experimental practice reconfigures cosmetics as both a mark-making tool and a conceptual medium. Engaging in material-based inquiry, Mateo employs body prints on sheets, makeup on sandpaper, nylon stockings, and peel-off masks to construct and deconstruct complex narratives of race, class, gender, performance, language, memory, and thought. Through these interventions, repurposed materials become extensions of the trans/immigrant/alien/other body, forging a visual language that is at once intimate, confrontational, and deeply embodied.

Born in the Philippines and immigrating to the United States in 1981, Mateo was raised as a Third Culture Kid and U.S. military dependent, navigating the dissonance of displacement, disruption, and hyper-gendered environments. Rooted in printmaking and painting, Mateo’s evolving practice examines the fluidity of identity, treating surfaces and textures as sites of both erasure and inscription—where histories are layered, contested, and rewritten. By transforming controlled spaces through material interventions, Mateo speculates on how altered objects and personas challenge imposed borders, mutate through lived experience, and exist beyond fixed definitions.

Through continuous expansion and critical inquiry, Mateo interrogates Identity as Fiction, crafting visual and material interventions that question the constructs of self, otherness, and place. In an era where identities are increasingly scrutinized, redacted, contested, and commodified, Mateo’s work offers a compelling exploration of how bodies, objects, and materials negotiate agency within shifting sociopolitical landscapes.

Mateo received a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz and an M.F.A. from the University of California, Irvine.  Mateo  lives, works, and plays in Los Angeles.