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Alanna Spence
Contact:
website:AlannaSpence.com
photos: Flickr
email: alanna@alannaspence.com
myspace: angrypirate
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Artist Statement We rely on honeybees to pollinate one third of our food supply. Through the years we have developed a system that maximizes food production by manipulating the honeybee's natural abilities. Our industrial agricultural complex has grown so large, that we are over-extending the bees. Our current method of food production is unsustainable. The honeybees are vanishing by the millions and no one can figure out why. My paintings and installations are a blithe and playful exploration of what might happen to us if the honeybees vanish completely. I imagine each painting as a snapshot in a timeline that begins with utopian bliss and ends with a post-apocalyptic world. Through mocking my own anxieties about the grim future that bombards me daily in the media, I find a voice for my fears. The beekeepers in my paintings play the roll of hapless protagonist. They are the final hope in a seemingly futile situation. The ambiguous space and abstracted organic forms employed in my paintings illustrate the confusion and uncertainty of the future. My installation using floral imagery created from fabric and paper, are my physical recreation of this narrative that. Craft materials that I have been surrounded with all my life, are a natural medium for me to create this imagined world. Humor and whimsy serve as an icebreaker between the viewer and my subject matter. By creating a fantastic world in which to experience my paintings, the viewer is transported from a dry white walled gallery into an artificial environment that complements the fragmented narratives in the paintings. |
Poisonous
30" x 40" Oil on Canvas
2008
The Searchers
38" x 44" 2008
Oil on Canvas
Installation view of "The Rapture"
Hanging On
44" x 36" Oil on Canvas
2008
Swarm
11" x 17" 2008
Oil on Canvas
Colony Collapse Disorder #14
24" x 36" 2008
Oil on Canvas