Alana Fitzgerald
Transplanted to North Carolina after Hurricane Sandy, I’m a native New Yorker of more than one diaspora. My work circles around fragmentation and rebuilding. I seek to recall and describe otherworldly dimensions, mining patchworked subconscious architecture for an ancient future.
Radical ecology inspired visions of the end of civilization and also the beginning. The beginning of hope and reconnection that transcends a totalitarian capitalism induced dystopia.
Not a singular event, but an intuition that big shifts were coming. The question is clear- what happens to art in a hurricane? My semi-abstract metaphysical landscapes and still lives contain mysterious forces and liminal objects. There’s light and weather, plausible environments despite expressionist marks. Motifs of animism, resistance, the elements, disaster-almost. Figures, magic, trees, cairns and garbage are all upon the altars. Bits of cut and pasted wilderness describe a fragmented feminine gaze, a rupture in relationship to the body and earth. American colors, digital detritus. Images of environments layered to create dense, oscillating collages. Natural elements reorganized into abstraction, and gesture organized into artificial nature.
I stage architectural interventions, surreal events and uncanny surprises hidden in public spaces and wildernesses. I am interested in creating a space for art within a living context, a contrast to the mausoleum that is the museum- educational and ritual spaces being a participatory alternative to memorial or commodity.
Paintings are both portals and signifiers of themselves. I sometimes collage paintings into landscapes, as an offering and question.