Audacity: Palatial Dreaming and Realities

With frothy golden titles such as Opulence and Come Live with Me Angel, the works in “Audacity”–Alanna Fields’ first international exhibition at Plug In ICA–softly gazed out at us in the bustle of the gallery on opening night. Alongside walls painted corresponding colours, each canvas blurred into the backdrop of the evening, creating a perfect atmosphere for reunions and conversation among friends. With a focus on the everyday lives of Black queer kin, “Audacity” plays with embodiments of masculinity and femininity within recognizable gestures and expressions of Black queerness. Upon a second visit alone, I smiled to myself as I caught sight of the loudness of these familiar details, captured, preserved, and amplified with the utmost care. In both of these visits, I witnessed “Audacity” in its multiple forms: bombastic and grandiose in its decadence, yet seductive and quietly playful.

Alanna Fields is a mixed-media artist, currently living and working between Washington D.C. and New York. Using the archive as a research method, Fields started these recent works in the hopes of unpacking ancestral representations of Black queer folks that represent lived realities irreducible to a discourse of politics and oppression. She had a need to see images that were embodiments of masculinity and femininity, as she could find little to no representation of these expressions that, in her position as kin, she knew existed. With a desire to depict free expression in everyday life, she became captivated by the intimacy and ordinariness of photographs taken in the home. Fields then proceeded to source these personal images from various donations and sellers on eBay. Many of the photographs are from the 1960s and 1970s, a time in which more overt expressions of Black queer everyday life emerged. In her research, Fields was looking not just for people living, but people living well. After sourcing these photos, Fields scanned, edited and cleaned the photograph digitally, then printed the blown-up images onto canvas. She then exactingly applies wax to the canvas, sectioning off parts of each photograph and applying it opaquely in some areas and more transparently in others, letting parts of the image peek through, while others are covered completely. The wax creates a dance of concealment and exposure, as she uses the material as a framing device for recognition among kin. In the works included in “Audacity,” Fields sections off parts of the photos with a bronze glitter, adding an element of luxurious, excessive richness to the works.

In Come Live With Me Angel, the photo is repeated and loosely arranged in a triptych. The panels on the right and left, sectioned off by bronze glitter, are covered in brown wax. The subject’s eyes pierce through the wax on the left, the steadiness of their gaze too intense to be fully concealed. Fields simultaneously invites us in while preventing us from fully stepping into the intimate moment of another’s everyday life. These interventions with wax are gestures of concealment and divulgence that honour the autonomy of her subjects while also reaching out and making contact with the viewer who speaks their language. In Miss Elijah, we see a faceless, cropped image of a figure with their hand on their hip. Their stomach and chest are exposed, as their shirt is unbuttoned and cut in a DIY cropped fashion, evident from the loose threads. A long-nailed hand is carefully perched on a hip, a little hesitant of the pose, but posturing nonetheless. Fields sees the nuances and encases them. A little dramatic, a little spicy and familiar, the wax on the left side of the canvas mirrors and highlights this all-too-important gesture: one that many queer kin know well. The wax in Fields’ artworks creates a tactile and textured surface that embodies both the act of preservation and the act of concealment, the two coexisting as one. In her application of the wax, she precisely controls the level of opacity and transparency, constructing a balance between what is revealed and what remains hidden. The interplay between concealment and exposure that the wax introduces mirrors the complexities of identity and self-expression within the Black queer experience. However, this is not done for protection, but for the sake of noticing the unseen, seeing but not quite seeing what is right in front of one’s face.

Fields’ use of repetition and collage evoke both old and new: a cut-up photo from a romance, layered and glued, or a glitch on a computer desktop, causing the same image to be opened over and over, carefully arranged like love letters from Fields that unveil the truth of an everyday existence. By preserving, honouring and documenting her kin, she questions what it was like to have been, what it is to be, and what it is to become. In picking out these moments, Fields expresses an existence that transcends the political, inside a realm where there are a multitude of possibilities. Her meticulous selection and arrangement of archival photographs create images that, through repetition, transcend time and space, bridging the gap between past and present. The result is a visual chorus, echoing across generations, inviting in yet simultaneously preventing the audience from stepping into the intimate moments of their everyday life – concealing but divulging for the ones who know the code to step into the portal.

The repetition and collage techniques employed by Fields serve as tools that echo the cyclical nature of personal histories and experiences. The layering and gluing of cut-up photos evoke a sense of fragmented memories and reconstructed narratives, reflecting the intergenerational connections and the shared stories that transcend time and space that have now been brought to the forefront of the archive. The glitches and duplications, reminiscent of digital artifacts, further emphasize the blending of past and present, highlighting the fluidity and ever-evolving nature of personal and collective histories. The works in “Audacity” are coming-of-age stories, lavish moments shrouded in the loose layers of time that Fields, finely attuned, chooses to either highlight or conceal. Like a kaleidoscope, Fields wields herself as the light, highlighting refractions of the knowledge she holds as kin: the all-too-familiar unsureness, yet the knowing of coming into your own.

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Shaneela Boodoo

This article is published in issue 40.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue