Alan Powell
Elkins Park, PA
Artist, educator, believer in the power of the collective spirit
MessageAlan Powell is an internationally exhibiting electronic media artist working in video, photography, performance, and multichannel installation. His 50-year career has been grounded in collaboration, community engagement, and embracing technological evolution in his artistic practice. He holds an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. In the 1970s, Alan co-founded Electron Movers, the video artist collective and Providence, RI’s first Media Arts Center. Electron Movers were vanguards in proving the capacity of video as an art form while staying deeply connected to Providence with immersive performances and community-oriented creative models.
Over five decades, Alan’s work has shown at The Kitchen, Hallswalls, CEPA, and The Museum of the Moving Image in New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia; The Long Beach Museum in California and the Musee d’Arte Moderne in Paris. Videotapes from Alan’s thirty-year collaboration with Connie Coleman, his late partner, have been broadcast on PBS and are archived at Cornell University Library and Electronic Arts Intermix in NYC.
During their partnership, Alan and Coleman delved into experimental documentary, sculptural installation, as well as a return to their artistic backgrounds of traditional printmaking and fine arts to investigate mass media and explore culture and language systems.
Following Coleman’s death, Alan relocated his studio to the Catskills. His daily practice brings into alignment all the mediums he has worked across in his career; he regularly incorporates painting, video and electronic imaging in installations and continues to observe the fragile balance between human presence and the natural world.
An emeritus professor of communications at Arcadia University, Alan serves on the board of Philadelphia-based collective Termite TV and Signal Culture in Owego, NY.
Statement
I have a long relationship with the forest and nature. As a child I spent my summers on my grandfather’s tree farm and as a teenage I learned wilderness survival in Canada. I have always struggled with the relationship between art and nature. I think it is important that as an artist, I develop work about nature that goes beyond its physical beauty. Electronic technology has allowed me to develop ways of looking and experiencing the natural world using time, sound, and motion as the other qualities that define a natural space. I have also started to use the technologies of 3-D imaging and modeling as a way of documenting those experiences. When I go into the forest or into a wetland. I use many sorts of electronic tools to document my experience. Each type of camera, lenses, and microphones record the environment in different ways. I use image and sound processing to enhance and personalize the documented experience. My video tapes no longer function as experimental narratives but electronic paintings that change over time. The work is now exhibited in galleries on looping media players on flat screens or projectors but also on instagram and Vimeo replacing the broadcast model.
My work has always been connected to social process and human experience. My undergraduate education was classic modernism and formalism . In hindsight I drifted into both photography and video because the narrative was still very much alive in these media. My graduate work focused on Marxism, Post Marxism and Post Structuralism and the construct of reality and values as it meshed in electronic media and its influence in defining our reality. The artwork from 1983 - 2020 always was constructed through a political lens. This culminated with the “Trump Dump” a four year investigation into the madness of not only Trump but also within the American culture both embracing it and trying erase it like it did’t exist. The Trump Dump was both aggressively censored and praised.
Since moving to the Catskills in 2013, I have rediscovered that intense involvement I had with nature as a child. In the Catskill community I have found a rich mix of different kinds of people and a rich cultural and artistic heritage. I have allowed the last thirteen years to be an open ended exploration and conversation with my art making processes and materials.
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