Spirit Guides" Acrylic on canvas from my 2009 'Flesh or Fantasy' series.
Artist Statement from this series:
The concept of home shifts when we migrate and cross borders into another country.
This intensifies as we travel back and forth between the two culturally diverse worlds creating a constant search for identity.
This series of work explores my multiple modes of existence, my search for identity between my two homes - Trinidad and the United States, viewing ‘home’ not as a set space but as fragmented memories and dreams that encroach on reality. In this conflict, my paintings become a conduit for this push and pull where one space or ideal takes over another moving between cultural plains that are both familiar and foreign re-locating and re-defining the concept of “Home”
I translate these aspects in my abstracted mixed media paintings on canvas and paper through juxtapositions of color, texture, figurative abstractions and visual movement. The iconographic images of the Caribbean such as the classic palm tree associated with the tropics, and the carnival characters specific to Trinidadian Carnival, are highlighted to emphasize the real and the unreal. Carni-Val meaning farewell to flesh is steeped in masquerade, disguise, pretense and role play which, is sometimes needed, to protect the real flesh, the real me, Alison Wells. Who is she when at home or in the US? What role does she have to assume? What images assault her psyche, her sexuality, her creativity? Images of color, race, and its effect on her existence, images of change and how it affects her world. The international perspective, the US perspective, colored with seasonal changes images of grays and dullness, leafless trees and icicles that gleam in the sunlight and yet the breath of life sprouting and the fullness of color once more reviving the spirit until color gives one last breath before giving way to change again. There is both chaos and order as images morph and transform into something new be it flesh or fantasy – it is a hybrid of my two worlds.
Artist Statement from this series:
The concept of home shifts when we migrate and cross borders into another country.
This intensifies as we travel back and forth between the two culturally diverse worlds creating a constant search for identity.
This series of work explores my multiple modes of existence, my search for identity between my two homes - Trinidad and the United States, viewing ‘home’ not as a set space but as fragmented memories and dreams that encroach on reality. In this conflict, my paintings become a conduit for this push and pull where one space or ideal takes over another moving between cultural plains that are both familiar and foreign re-locating and re-defining the concept of “Home”
I translate these aspects in my abstracted mixed media paintings on canvas and paper through juxtapositions of color, texture, figurative abstractions and visual movement. The iconographic images of the Caribbean such as the classic palm tree associated with the tropics, and the carnival characters specific to Trinidadian Carnival, are highlighted to emphasize the real and the unreal. Carni-Val meaning farewell to flesh is steeped in masquerade, disguise, pretense and role play which, is sometimes needed, to protect the real flesh, the real me, Alison Wells. Who is she when at home or in the US? What role does she have to assume? What images assault her psyche, her sexuality, her creativity? Images of color, race, and its effect on her existence, images of change and how it affects her world. The international perspective, the US perspective, colored with seasonal changes images of grays and dullness, leafless trees and icicles that gleam in the sunlight and yet the breath of life sprouting and the fullness of color once more reviving the spirit until color gives one last breath before giving way to change again. There is both chaos and order as images morph and transform into something new be it flesh or fantasy – it is a hybrid of my two worlds.
RSS Feed
