AFTER MAKING MONUMENTS
Alana Fitzgerald’s work activates social experience through “the object,” whether painting, installation, or sculptural intervention. Emerging from a lineage that includes abstraction, the New York School, conceptualism, institutional critique, and relational aesthetics, their practice engages both the formal and the social, merging material experimentation with lived experience. Influenced by folk culture, ecofeminism, and the ongoing polycrises of genocide, ecocide, and femicide, their work presents both a schematic representation of catastrophe and a proposition for its reconfiguration. It holds a mirror to what is—our smallness in the face of natural forces—while simultaneously envisioning a future beyond collapse.
Entropy materializes in bright candy colors. The work maps fragmentation and reconstruction, gesturing toward otherworldly dimensions through subconscious architecture—a patchworked vision of an Ancient Future. Scenes of human civilization in flux, transforming yet teetering on the edge of dystopia, unfold within a simultaneous acceptance of destruction and reverence for renewal. Surrendering to nature’s chaos, Fitzgerald’s work moves fluidly between painting, wall drawings, digital collage, and sculptural installation, existing at the intersection of abstraction and realism. The question emerges: What happens to art in a hurricane? In war?
Fitzgerald’s practice merges the readymade with relational aesthetics, reactivating physical objects as artifacts of collective experience—past, present, and speculative future. The work engages with Walter Benjamin’s lost aura, not in a hermetic sense, but as something fundamentally communitarian. This “backwards readymade” takes art beyond institutional containment, returning it, in theory, to a form of usefulness. The sacred, rather than existing in designated spaces, is omnipresent—an altar formed not from singular objects but from reassembled fragments of disaster and memory. Recreated hurricane spirals, boats stitched together from the remnants of their past forms, stones lining the shore—each installation is an assemblage of artificial and organic, recycled and newly created materials, blurring the lines between domesticity, digital phenomenology, and untamed nature.
Fitzgerald’s material choices are deeply tied to lived experience. Post-Hurricane Sandy, they found themselves sorting through surplus donations, witnessing the material overflow of disaster relief. Motherhood further altered their material relationship—an excess of clothing became both burden and medium, an echo of survival tactics. Working with what is available, the practice aims at sustainability—albeit imperfectly, resisting the sanitized aesthetics of eco-friendly consumerism. The work does not seek aesthetic cohesion but instead thrives in the mess, reflecting an honest engagement with the collision of material and theoretical space.
At its core, this is a practice of formal re-organization, mirroring the logic of natural disasters. Biomimicry offers a way forward: to work with nature, as part of nature. Within these shifting assemblages, there is both grandness and humility. The studio operates as an ecological system, self-cannibalizing—reconfiguring the same set of materials across different installations and environments. Paintings serve as both standalone works and portals into 3-D space, referencing the fourth wall in a way that nods to Jean-Luc Godard. The work disrupts expectations, confronting colonial and capitalist destruction while offering the possibility of escape from the matrix.
There is an inherent tension—both anti-art in a Dadaist or punk sense and deeply invested in art’s potential for sincerity. Its lack of clear function and resistance to commodification mean its activation happens only in communal context, rather than through individual ownership. Though visually grand, the practice embraces frailty and de-skilled making, recognizing materials as their own living archive. It does not claim party-art lineage, yet shares its aspiration toward a Temporary Autonomous Zone—a space for immersion, ritual, and transformation.
In reconstructing nature through art materials and waste, Fitzgerald challenges the flattening of nature into image. In an era where nature is increasingly experienced through screens, the work reanimates it as a body, a breathing archive rather than a static text. Through hyper-nature, it reclaims lost volume, aura, and agency. It is a meditation on ecological disaster and late-stage capitalism, an urgent call to reawaken human connection to the living world.
At times, the work offers catharsis; at others, an unsettling confrontation. Eventually, there is no distinction between its 2-D and 3-D manifestations—paintings hang alongside destroyed canvases, integrated into sculptural installations of bones, concrete, flowers, safety flags, boulders, and twigs. Everything that exists in 2-D finds its way into physical space. The viewer, standing on the other side of these portals, inhabits both the wreckage of the world and the possibility of its transformation.