MFA Galleries: Exhibitions

In search of the point where abstraction meets the real to represent the present, MFA student Alana Fitzgerald explores disaster through abstraction in a body of new work from her first year. Working in 360 degrees from Painting to Installation, a liminal environment is created where a once imagined reality spills off of the canvas and into the space. The work creates a dialog between fragmentation and rebuilding. Surrendering to the powers of nature and chaos, the paintings and 3-D work offer a concrete version of channelled energy. Since October of 2023 she has been actively working on a painting and installation project that addresses not only her subjectivity and experiences through abstraction but the disasters of war and ecological destruction. A memory of the loss of place in the wake of natural disaster, a memorial for discarded materials and an honoring of our collective mess. 

Through a deconstructed landscape of form and content, decontextualized and re-contextualized images of nature and the body fragmented, these elements document an inner process of dissolution and reformation, accumulation and dispersal. We view an energetic schema of worlds in upheaval. The question is clear- what happens to art in a hurricane? A war?

Motifs of animism, resistance, the elements, disaster, almost-figures, magic, trees, stone monuments and garbage are all upon the altar of the work. Bits of cut and pasted wilderness describe a fractured gaze, a rupture in relationship to the body and the earth that is generational. Through this language the artist addresses patterns of trauma and dislocation: Natural elements are reorganized into abstraction, and gesture organized into artificial nature. The goal of the work is constant transformation, a process with its own ecology.