About Oscar soto mitchell.

Oscar Soto is a current MFA student at Winthrop University. Born in Brazil to a Chilean father and a Chilean-born “American” mother, and raised in a house where he often could not understand the languages spoken around him, Oscar has always maintained a complicated and playfully self-aware relationship with personal identity and incomprehension.

After completing a BFA in painting at Winthrop, he worked as a custom picture framer before moving abroad to teach English. He spent 3 years teaching in South Korea before ultimately spending 4 and half years in Chile. Much of his time in Chile was spent in the southern city of Temuco, in the old unoccupied house where his father grew up, literally between a church and a prison.

In 2017, Oscar returned to the United States to begin his MFA studies. Abandoning painting, for the moment, he is currently focused on making furniture-based sculpture, using the familiar forms and functions of everyday objects to question the common certainties he sees as hindrances to free thinking. In his work, he seeks to acknowledge and embrace the subtler, more awkward human emotions that he sees as totally appropriate to our human reality.