Collection: LLANOR ALLEYNE
Llanor Alleyne is a Barbados-born, New York-raised mixed media artist whose work explores the transformation and transfiguration of female selfhood. Her practice breaks away from the conventional demands of modern collage-making by cutting, tearing, and layering originally created abstract paintings on various materials to examine female figurative presentation and the empathetic rapport women are often assumed to have with the natural world.
Her 2017 series, "Queering Cane," expresses the fears, anxieties, tenderness, and unity experienced by queer women in a region that at the time was ruled by sodomy laws. Curator Ladi'Sasha Jones said of the series, “Queering Cane yields a fantastical effect to the realities of the queer woman’s body and bodies in relation to one another, in the Caribbean... Many of [Alleyne's] subjects appear ghostly, or fable-like as they perform disappearing acts between the black back-drops they emerge from and the sharp contrasts of the surrounding cane stalks and colorful landscape positioned in the foreground. There’s an abundance of movement throughout the works. No static posturing. Only vivid and intentional compositions of the bodily subjectivity.”
Alleyne describes collaging as "world building," supporting her own journey of self-discovery and reinvention. Her "Fugitive Ecologies" series, produced in 2020, conveys "rebellious botanicals" thirsting to create a new world and reflecting her own situation as she was thrust into lockdown and self-quarantine in the midst of an already isolating move from Barbados to Tulsa, Oklahoma in March 2020. The works reflect a desire to find grounding in a new place amid surreal circumstances. "They are sprouting up — in their unusual and unique forms — in a city that is heavily marked by parking lots and expressways, in a nearly empty apartment devoid of even one house plant, from seeds planted in the tropics." By "seeds" Alleyne is referring to the paintings, originally created in Barbados, that were used in each collage, creating familiar yet completely imaginary forms that spring to life in mixed media.
The influence of Alleyne's Caribbean roots is evident in her work. She began painting as a child, depicting colorful tropical scenes as a means of processing her feelings of homesickness after immigrating to the United States at the age of 8. She has also been deeply influenced by Caribbean writers, in particular their incorporation of "loud dreaming" sessions as depicted in Toni Morrison's Paradise, a form of group therapy that involves screaming and dancing to release trauma and induce healing.
Alleyne's work has been widely exhibited in Barbados and throughout the United States. She was one of five artists selected in 2022 for a residency at the Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York, NY. The museum commissioned a large-scale collage by Alleyne, which was displayed from March 15-July 21, 2024 as part of the museum's "The Plural of He" exhibition. Alleyne's collage also appeared on the cover of the exhibition catalog.
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