Regarding her artmaking process, Alana says:
“I started making art collage in 1976, after a drawing took 6 months to finish. Now, digital technology allows me to work almost as fast as my brain can travel. Of course, my techniques developed as technology did. At first “compositing” was only prints on paper – sized up and down on zerox machines and glued to each other. Now it is digital, some created by AI, others collaged on a tablet and, eventually, merged in film. Each digital technology is chosen according to the task at hand.
Current tools include:
Procreate for collaging multiple digital images to tell the story of their lives, and for merging those with abstract feelings. It is also very useful for re-imagining images and layouts quickly
Chatgbt is my AI colleague, together we design and build abstract images starting from philosophical ideas
DaVinci Resolve is used to build the VFX animations of the relationships between the other two
Because it is digital, the work can be any size, but because the ideas I work with are big, powerful and strong the work needs to be as well. To give you an idea of scale, I have included in-situ images in the gallery of this site. An installation guides a person on clear path through a series of large images (both portraits and abstracts), leading to loop of projected film and animated work. The film/sound experience is both musical and includes the voice of one or more of the elders shown in portraiture. Abstracts and imagery intended to induce ideas about the resiliency and positive potentials of life see the visitor out.”
Regarding her Research Process…
Action Research became Alana’s research methodology of choice, during her doctoral work at Columbia University in 2000, primarily because of its participatory flexibility in structure. Put simply there are four stages to every AR cycle or round: discovery and planning, action, data collection and analysis and reflection. Everything is done in rounds of the four stages, and usually there are multiple cycles. In community the situation grows, morphs, and moves closer to the goals. Life is messy and frequently stages of the research overlap. At the end, the researcher is always held to final reflection including the people, places, etc that were studied, being part of the final anaysis of outcome.
Alana says:
“All research methodology inherently measures the past, and this is a problem for situations where people want to build something new. Because of the rounds of research cycles, Action Research (which has been called by many names) measures situations closer to when they happen and this allows participants to plan and execute for a new future – while not measuring the future, this is about as close as we can to measuring evolution as it emerges.”
