Alanna Fields

Issue 172

Audacity (2020)
Mirages of Dreams Past (2021-current)

“I find this selection of works important because they bridge together two bodies of works that symbolize the breaking through of veils while pointing to the complexities and limitations of visibility. In the selected works from Audacity and Mirages of Dreams Past, the presence of wax shifts in opacity, symbolizing layers being lifted from the veil of invisibility. Meditating on memory, vulnerability and intimacy, each work focuses the lens to every-day representations of black queer desire and sensuality in the 1960s and 1970s vernacular photography. The work demands the viewer acknowledge black queer life formally as the aesthetic choices in clothing, posture, and gesture shift the conversation of coded investigation to one of audacious declaration.”

Alanna Fields is a mixed-media artist and archivist whose work unpacks Black queer history through a multidisciplinary engagement with found photographs. Her processes of making work, from researching and sourcing the images to remixing and reframing the imagery through hand-painting with wax, redresses historically excluded absences from the past. By excavating histories that have been discarded as unimportant or buried to hide its existence, her work uncovers and centers a deep history of Black queer life.

Alanna Fields lives and works in Washington, D.C.
alannafields.com | @alannafields