SK Alanna, you and I first spoke in the late summer of 2020, in conjunction with a piece I was writing for Aperture about feminism and collage. The essay included images from As We Were, an early series of yours which draws on found archival images of black queer bodies, overlaid with bright wax geometries that frame and draw attention to particular gestures. This work seems to be, still, a foundation for your practice, and I wonder if you can start by talking a bit about how you came to this approach, and how it’s expanded in the last five years?

AF It’s great to be in conversation with you again, Sara. My work has indeed evolved since making my 2019 series As We Were, but that series remains the foundation for my archival practice, ways of seeing and making.

Since then my work has gradually shifted, particularly in my use of wax. In my early work, the treatment of wax to the surface of the archival images served as veils, a gesture of both obscurity and protection of those subjects, while paying attention to the quietude of queering being played out in the frames.

Over time through my later series, Audacity and Mirages of Dreams Past, the compositions of wax departed from veiling, instead creating sightlines and portals for the viewer to peer into a photographic memory. Conceptually, the work became less about visualizing a time where queerness had to be obscured or rendered illegible, and more about queerness becoming audacious, prominent, and proud. Audacity, a series set in the 1960-80s, brings in bright and metallic hues offering a vibrancy that As We Were lacked. Mirages of Dreams Past, set in the 1960s-1970s, visualizes an idyllic Black queer dream space through kaleidoscopic compositions of thin translucent wax, mirroring stained glass-like portals. In my studio practice, in ideation and in making the work, I am considering the viewer in spatial and dimensional ways that I had not before.

The scale of the work has also become much larger since As We Were. Each piece in Mirages of Dreams Past takes up space of spatial and experiential significance. It was important to me for the work to command space and control over the room, to be exalted in a way.

Moving into my most recent series Crossing the Line, those works are even larger and take on a sculptural dimensionality, where the surface and paneled image recesses and protrudes strategically throughout the frame. Standing in front of the work as a viewer brings about a reflexive way of seeing and taking the work in. There’s a deeper conversation with the surface, what comes at you and what clings to itself.

SK It’s interesting to think about ways that the scale of your work continues to shift - this is always to me one of the great and unique features of photographs—that they have no inherent or ideal size, but can adapt to different spatial and architectural contexts. For instance, for your presentation at CONTACT this year, you’re enlarging images to billboard size. How do you think about scale, or how the work might hit differently when it’s experienced as a large-scale work in a public space, versus say, a more sculptural form in a gallery? Or, for the matter, the shift from the original source materials, which I imagine are relatively small snapshot-sized photographs?

AF I agree, one of the beautiful things about working with photographs is the potential for constant manipulation of scale. As humans, we experience and process the world around us through scale. So for my presentation with CONTACT, I wanted to tap into this idea of vastness in the way that I approached the billboards. It was central for me to create something that the viewer can get sucked into and lost in, like a vortex. It made sense to use imagery from Mirages of Dreams Past, because the nature of the work itself, the dreamlike imagery and kaleidoscopic compositions of wax already serve as a visual portal of sorts. So exponentially scaling this work up enhanced the sense of vastness that mesmerizes the viewer. I always aim to create a sense of slow looking in my work, and this presentation of billboards allows me to lean into that intention even more.

As for the source material, these are all small 4x5 inch photographs which typically are seen in the format of a photo album. So what we are seeing is these photographs coming to life, becoming massive as we as viewers shrink in their presence. It’s an interesting flip in our relationship to looking at photographs.

SK I’m excited to experience them at this scale. I love the idea of this flip in our relation to images. And it isn’t only scale that creates this change. I think as viewers we bring a really different set of expectations to our encounters with images in different contexts—say what we want or expect from an image in an art gallery and what we want or expect from a billboard—a space usually reserved for advertising. Something interesting happens when what we find is at odds with what we expect, and I’ve always felt that this disconnect can really sharpen our critical faculties, keep us alert to what’s around us. This also seems to me to be really central to your work.

AF It’s true, billboards often tell us what to buy or what to think. What I am offering through these billboards is an invitation to slip into your own consciousness, to find nostalgia in something that might be both distant and familiar—like a distant memory triggered by something seemingly insignificant or ordinary—or conversely, to find curiosity in the unfamiliar in a way that creates a self-questioning as the viewer mentally turns inward. I’m drawn to these possibilities in experience where the viewer’s expectations are challenged and they walk away with something they didn’t know they needed. That really is the magic of the work for me.

SK I love the title of the series, Mirages of Dreams Past. A kind of double mind blur: an optical illusion of unconscious images. The works play on this idea of doubling and rippling, sometimes in an almost psychedelic way. Can you maybe choose one or two works from the series and talk a little bit about how you come to the original archival images, and your approach to manipulating them?

AF I began this series during my 2020 residency at Baxter Street Camera Club in NYC. The residency culminated in a solo exhibition, so at the inception of this work I was considering the space and environment I wanted to create. I knew that in terms of source material I wanted to use images from the 1960s and 1970s—a very psychedelic period socially and culturally. I wanted to then get into that idea of a psychedelic trance, and to mirror my idea of a Black queer dream space from the past. From there, I began making the work, focusing on photographs that pictured a singular subject in solitude, in nature or in intimate scenes in the homespace. “Close Your Eyes and Remember” is the first piece of the series which pictures a figure sitting on a pink draped sofa in a living room, going through the pages of a photo while peering directly into the camera’s lens. When I got this photograph from eBay I knew it would be an important part of this series because it directly references this presence of “the archive” both not and in the past. Compositionally, I wanted to play with the subject’s direct gaze, and so his eyes become the focal point, a kaleidoscopic treatment of pink wax applied to the surface of the print. There is this haziness in the work from the image being repeated three times as it pulls you inward, similar to a recollected memory. You’ll see that throughout the series, such as in “Come to My Garden,” where we find a woman seated in a field, nude on a blanket. There is a reflexiveness to the repetition that brings you into the scene, a visual pull that places you in the center of a mirage from the past.

SK This is such a powerful image. The presence of the album, and all kinds of other archival materials - a magazine that looks like it’s been marked with post-it notes, a constellation of what appear to be framed photographs on the wall behind him. The visual effects and layers you’ve added give it a cinematic feel, a distinct sense that it’s part of a specific narrative, even if we don’t have all the details.

The internet and sites like eBay have been an extraordinary way of recovering and recollecting images, forming new archives, new narratives, from scattered and lost analogue photographs. Do you think of the images you collect as an archive? Or maybe to ask this another way, how do add up to something, or show us something, as you bring them together?

AF eBay has been a well of archival material. I’ve collected photographs, film negatives, vintage queer magazines. I think of my archival practice as excavation work - digging up lost or discarded remnants of Black and queer history as a means to piece together what has been left out. So in a way I’m building my own archive of cultural and historical material from the past, contextualising it as a more complete story than what recorded history and archival institutions have offered us thus far. When I think about this work, what keeps me going is yes my deep interest in preservation but also the knowingness of what is at risk if this work is not done. History will be lost.

SK It’s not just the collecting of course that reactivates these images, but the ways that they enter the public realm, and the collective imagination. First in the ways that you are working with them to draw out elements and ways of seeing them. And then in various kinds of exhibition contexts, in galleries, and now on billboards. But the book, or the printed page, seems like a natural place for them, a kind of return to the intimacy of the album. I know your first book has just been printed (congratulations!) - I wonder if you can talk a little about how you approached bringing these images to book form?

AF Thank you, I’m very excited about the Unveiling book release. When approaching the concept and design of the book, my focus was on creating an intimate experience with the tactility of the artwork and the composition of repetition, layers, and veils. When looking through the pages of the book, I want the viewers to feel like they are inside the work, looking more closely than you would if you were viewing it in an exhibition context—pulling the layers back yourself and moving through a process of veiling and unveiling. So the book has become an album of my work, up close and personal, remixing these archival images to exist in new visually experiential ways—while still honoring them in the lineage of the photo album.

SK I’ve actually just today laid hands on a copy. It’s a beautiful thing, Alanna, and I think really achieves the kind of close looking you describe. There’s a visceral experience in turning pages and finding new ways into images, sometimes through a closing in on a detail, and sometimes by some interference or obscuring, which has the effect of asking the viewer/reader to look even harder, to try to see something beyond the surface. It brings me back to all the ways you’re working with photographs–in exhibition in relation to the physical body of the viewer, as sculptural objects, and here also in a more intimate album context.

In closing, I wonder if you tell me what you’re thinking about these days? Where your next project may take you?

AF I’m happy that you’re able to sit with the work in a new, more intimate way!

Coming off my series “Crossing the Line,” I am thinking about sculpture, form, and what it means to bring the work further off of the wall, or completely off of the wall. I’m interested in departing from the traditional 2D way of experiencing an image within a square or rectangle or mounted on a wall. So in the future, I’d say, expect the unexpected from me.

—

Unveiling by Alanna Fields is on view until May 31, 2025

Presented by CONTACT.
Supported by Pattison Outdoor Advertising.
Curated by Luther Konadu.

Alanna Fields (b. 1990, Maryland, USA) is a mixed-media artist and archivist whose work unpacks Black queer history through a multidisciplinary engagement with photographic archives. Fields’ work has been featured in exhibitions at Yancey Richardson Gallery, Yossi Milo Gallery, Latchkey Gallery, David Castillo Gallery, and Residency Art Gallery among others. She has participated in exhibitions at The Brooklyn Museum, The Sugar Hill Museum in Harlem, The High Museum of Art, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Plug In ICA, SF Camerawork, and has shown work at Paris Photo, Art Basel Miami, Expo Chicago, and Felix Art Fair LA. Fields is a Gordon Parks Foundation Scholar and has participated in residencies at Light Work, Baxter Street CCNY, Silver Arts Projects, Fountainhead Arts, and TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image among others. She received her MFA in Photography from Pratt Institute and is a professor of Photography at Howard University. Fields has given artist talks at the Aperture Foundation, Light Work, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Parsons New School, Syracuse University, and Stanford University. Her work has been published in the New York Times, Aperture Magazine, FOAM Magazine, and The Atlantic. Fields lives and works between Washington, D.C., and New York City.

Sara Knelman is a writer and curator. She has worked as Executive Director and Publisher of C Magazine, Executive Director of Two Rivers Gallery, Director of Corkin Gallery, Talks Programmer at The Photographers’ Gallery, and Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. Her recent book Lady Readers (Ottoby Press, 2024) explores her collection of found photographs of women reading. Sara has written about contemporary art and photography for 1000 Words, Aperture, Canadian Art, Frieze, Prefix Photo and Source: The Photographic Review as well as numerous books and cataloges. She lives in Toronto.