interview by Charlie Kolbrener
In Alison Blickle’s work, viewers are invited to witness a glimpse of a world just as realized off the canvas as it is on it. The figures at the heart of her painting—sometimes based on elaborate photoshoots, sometimes an amalgam of disparate body parts from various sources—are characters who signal larger narratives reflecting our modern world, or concocted visions that live outside of time. Her latest collection, Future Ruins, on view at the Kravets Wehby Gallery, invites attendees to inspect a future that infuses a nostalgic melancholy for nature with a glimmer of the beauty still accessible in her perhaps pessimistic view of what lies ahead.
Blickle has effectively been painting her whole life, but went on to study Political Economy when plagued with the feeling that “it felt too impractical to pursue as a career.” After working for Diane Feinstein for six months, her realization that “whatever your job is is what your life is” would send her back to get her MFA at Hunter College and embark on the creative path that sees her work on display in New York City now, over a decade later. As we prepare to discuss her new collection, she reflects to me how she first made the leap into pursuing painting: “I have to pursue what I know fulfills me and what I love.”
CHARLIE KOLBRENER: The process for creating this collection differed a bit from your work over the past few years. Can you tell me a bit about how you were producing work previously?
ALISON BLICKLE: I didn’t do it for this body of work, but for the past five or six years, I would put on big photoshoots to get reference images for the paintings. And they ended up getting pretty elaborate. I did a shoot at Jeffrey Deitch’s house in LA, in the Hollywood Hills. I would find interesting locations and have mostly art world friends helping set up lights, build sets, and everything. And that was something I’d never done before. I’d been painting for so long, and I found ways to challenge myself with it and to evolve with it. So, it was fun while I was doing these shoots to push myself into a totally different thing. And painting is totally solo, so having to collaborate and direct people and everything, it was fun.
Future Ruins is on view through October 4 @ Kravets Wehby Gallery 76 Wooster Street New York