ANDREA ALONGE

This exhibition has closed, but if you would like to view available works from this collection please contact us.

Exhibition Statement

Andrea Alonge examines the bridges built between the self and other, exploring where the journey begins and ends—our interactions, chemical exchanges, gentle touches, and all the ways we are tied to one another. The core of who we are, our still center, becomes a place for self-reflection and discovery, as well as an anchor for which we reach out from. Boundaries, walls, boxes, chains, ties, and whirlpools emerge as metaphors for relationships we continuously reimagine. Created at the height of the pandemic, Alonge balances a myriad of shifting connections through color, pattern, surface embellishment, and texture. What results is a collection of textiles that evoke digital qualities, marking a new era for tactility. Alonge expertly mixes both the ontological and practical, with an almost devout commitment to the handcrafted. These works center the domestic, romantic, platonic, existential, and spiritual relationships in our lives. We are individual microcosms, each one of us a little universe, touching all the others by way of infinite expansion, connecting on micro and macro levels. In a year of innumerable failures, false starts, heartaches, and losses Alonge both captivates and propels. We can take forever, just a minute at a time.

Andrea Alonge’s labor-intensive, meditative works recall natural wonders, landscapes, and psychedelic visions. 

Alonge interrogates the lines of intimacy we build with each other and our environments. Increasingly, we interact with and look at our worlds through a myriad of screens, our sense of time and space becoming heightened yet blurred. Glimpses of hope, of familiarity, perhaps even new versions of ourselves are reflected to us through her embellishments of intense color, texture, and startling compositions.

Her work invites the viewer to consider our compulsion to touch and tests our capacity to care for others. Often, patterns are created to capture the mix of chemical stimuli that informs how our bodies negotiate our proximity to isolation versus social richness. The balance is never static and is intricately portrayed by materiality––through bargain-bin fabrics, found threads, used sequins, pompoms, etc.–– and her persistence toward the painterly mark.

While observing the seemingly constant translation of our physical and energetic realms into digital ones, Alonge uses textiles as painting tools to examine relationships and tactility. She manipulates domestic materials and conventionally working-class sensibilities to chronicle illusion, contemplation, synchronicity, and longing.

The presence of multiple centers work as anchors for chords and bridges toward a renewed self. With tender precision, Alonge traces our searching during a time of disorientation, together.

Bio

Andrea Alonge is a textile artist born in Mesa, AZ, and is currently living and working in Portland, OR. She received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013, and her MFA in Fiber from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2015. She has shown nationally and internationally, including at Fiberart International 2019, US China Innovation in Fiber Art and Technology 2020, and Fiber Fever! She is a member of Carnation Contemporary in Portland, OR, and had a solo exhibition in the summer of 2020, The Kind Of Calmness Chaos Brings, as well as several group exhibitions, including a three-person show with James May Gallery in Algona, WI, titled Everything Is Fun With Us.

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Photography by John Whitten & Jeric Smith