Gallery Aferro’s 2nd Recipient of the Lynn and John Kearney Fellowship for Equity
Alanna Fields (b. 1990), creates work that draws upon the black queer archive. Working intimately with found photographs and vernacular photography, Fields’ work aims to reconstruct the way in which we process images of the past, pushing them past nostalgia towards the deep investigation of queer life. Further investigated within this work is the dialogue between black queer bodies in the photographic space, through gesture, the negotiation between queer legibility, and masking. In her multi-paneled mixed-media collages, Fields’ utilizes wax as a means to blur legibility and address the historical suppression of black queer representation. The presence of text within work often functions as whispers, buried under the wax and slipping in and out of legibility. The incorporation of found objects, functions as another means of concealment, fragmentation, and reconfiguration of the black queer body.