Alex Allred (°1973, Hayward, United States) creates media artworks, installations, mixed media artworks and conceptual artworks. By experimenting with aleatoric processes, Allred creates work in which a fascination with the clarity of content and an uncompromising attitude towards conceptual and minimal art can be found. The work is aloof and systematic and a cool and neutral imagery is used.
Her media artworks feature coincidental, accidental and unexpected connections which make it possible to revise art history and, even better, to complement it. Combining unrelated aspects lead to surprising analogies. By studying sign processes, signification and communication, she often creates work using creative game tactics, but these are never permissive. Play is a serious matter: during the game, different rules apply than in everyday life and even everyday objects undergo transubstantiation.
Her works are characterised by the use of everyday objects in an atmosphere of middleclass mentality in which recognition plays an important role. By taking daily life as subject matter while commenting on the everyday aesthetic of middle class values, she formalizes the coincidental and emphasizes the conscious process of composition that is behind the seemingly random works. The thought processes, which are supposedly private, highly subjective and unfiltered in their references to dream worlds, are frequently revealed as assemblages.
Her works bear strong political references. The possibility or the dream of the annulment of a (historically or socially) fixed identity is a constant focal point. By rejecting an objective truth and global cultural narratives, she creates with daily, recognizable elements, an unprecedented situation in which the viewer is confronted with the conditioning of his own perception and has to reconsider his biased position.
Her work urge us to renegotiate media art as being part of a reactive or – at times – autistic medium, commenting on oppressing themes in our contemporary society. With a subtle minimalistic approach, she makes works that can be seen as self-portraits. Sometimes they appear idiosyncratic and quirky, at other times, they seem typical by-products of American superabundance and marketing.
Her works question the conditions of appearance of an image in the context of contemporary visual culture in which images, representations and ideas normally function. By parodying mass media by exaggerating certain formal aspects inherent to our contemporary society, she makes work that generates diverse meanings. Associations and meanings collide. Space becomes time and language becomes image.
Her works are saturated with obviousness, mental inertia, clichés and bad jokes. They question the coerciveness that is derived from the more profound meaning and the superficial aesthetic appearance of an image. By merging several seemingly incompatible worlds into a new universe, she uses a visual vocabulary that addresses many different social and political issues. The work incorporates time as well as space – a fictional and experiential universe that only emerges bit by bit.
Her practice provides a useful set of allegorical tools for manoeuvring with a pseudo-minimalist approach in the world of media art: these meticulously planned works resound and resonate with images culled from the fantastical realm of imagination. Alex Allred currently lives and works in Seattle.
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