This mixed media piece and artist statement was published in the 2024 Santa Fe Literary Review.
ALISON MARIE DALE | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT
For most of my life, the practice of making art has been both my greatest therapy and path of meaningmaking. While I'm immersed in tracing wood- grain, experimenting with brush patterns, or cutting up old Life magazines,
I find myself in a trancelike state, connected not only to the sensuality of space around me but also the flow of time and history. Making collage work, for me, is like a divination practice, where I am able to make profound internal discoveries about how humans make sense of their place within the natural world around us through printed historical narratives of our collective subconscious. I love to begin my process by slowly and deliberately painting the grain of my wood panels. Doing this allows me to touch in with the beautiful growth patterns of mother nature through my hands, tapping into what I feel is the most beautiful art form possible. Next, I intuitively piece together collage elements and paint strokes that call to me, and oftentimes I'm surprised by the meaning I find in the resulting image.
I created this particular piece, “Billionaire Apes in Space,” in the summer
of 2021, when billionaires Bezos, Branson, and Musk were all taking part in
a personal space-race-for-the-one-percent. We were still in the height of
a global pandemic where people were suffering and tests and treatment were unattainable, and meanwhile these ridiculous humans were
blatantly spending millions on their joyrides to the edge of the atmosphere. Unsurprisingly, many Earth-ridden human apes were in full support of this,
as we were sold the great aspiration of space holidays for all, one fine day
in the future. The dollar bills collaged onto the ape's heart, hand, and eyes shows the pervasiveness and perverseness of the pursuit of money in our capitalistic society among the inequalities that surround us. This work, and many of my other paintings and collages, seek to spark curiosity about our perception of humanity's place within nature and help us recognize our deep interconnection with the world around us.