Featured Artist Monique Allain

Artist Monique Allain presents a series of mixed media constructions inspired by a strong connection with the earth. View more of her work on her website.

 

 

I am an interdisciplinary artist and independent researcher by vocation. A foreigner everywhere, I was born in São Paulo from French and Mexican parents, and have been living in New York since 2018. My roots and ties are in all these places. As a socio-environmentalist, I love nature and people. Being claustrophobic, I preserve my freedom and do not fit into general categories. I worked as a biologist until I realized life was to be lived with poetry.

 

 

In the year 2000, I went back to study and started creating. After completing a Bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts in 2007, I was awarded an art residency at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2008 and received a Master’s degree in Visual Arts in 2011.

 

 

In my studio I am a wizard.

That’s where I hide my secrets, where the process of doing happens! In my cauldron, dreams, fears, visions and pieces of existence are mixed and transformed into colors, shapes and textures. I know the potion I want to make and for which purpose. The result comes naturally, but it is always a surprise.

 

 

With my feet in the air and my head in the clouds, I live and create in search of my place and my peers. I wish to inhabit, to establish bonds. My artworks are experimental and procedural. Through them, I investigate identity and its dynamic relation with space, time and otherness.

 

 

I left the city and moved to a quiet area surrounded by nature. Since then, the focus has been on connecting and grounding with this new place. Isolation has stimulated concentration and introspection. Being in the middle of the woods allows me to sense a feeling of belonging, a strong connection to the earth. I started collecting stones, branches, feathers, seeds and bones. They are sewed on canvas scraps to compose words and phrases in Morse code. I used this analogue language during childhood. Doing so in this project brings me to my past and anchors me.

 

 

My latest series Archeology of a Liminal Space & Time is a work in progress.

I begin by cutting small canvas squares and painting them in white. Then I sew stones, pieces of wood and other found objects from nature on the canvas. I call these squares 1^st generation units.

 

 

Some of these squares are then sewn onto a larger canvas square. These are the 2^nd generation units.

 

 

During this process, I experimented with different compositions, these are the studies for composition for the larger 3^rd generation.

 

 

Finally, I sewed the 1^st and 2^nd generation pieces onto a much larger, 61” x 52” piece of canvas to create my final 3^rd generation piece. Now that I finished the main work, I will go back and redo all the 1^st and 2^nd generation pieces as individual works. The idea is to create a body of work that together will make an installation. This will be a 4th generation composition that will have three-dimensionality. The work as a whole will inhabit space.

 

 

Memories remind us who we are and where we come from. They allow us to envision which direction we want to take. These pieces are being brought together on larger screens to form a series of flags of our home, GAIA. Those shards of the daily existence constitute an Archeology of a Liminal Space & Time.

 

Artist Monique Allain invites you to follow her on Instagram and Vimeo.

 

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