004: Zoe Alameda
2000, Los Angeles, CA
Everyone I know has a crush on Zoe Alameda.
No like seriously, everyone. Everyone I spoke to just brought up “I just LOVE her,” “You’ll see when you meet her,” “I love what she’s doing with her work.” So needless to say expectations were high when I went to visit her in her south east studio in Los Angeles. Nestled in the back alleys of industrial warehouses, and up a wide flight of stairs painted with hazard yellow stripes is her studio. A duality of chaos and edited destruction greets me in the open room divided into sections. Zoe shares her studio with three other artists, and her section is the first one visitors walk into, greeting you with piles of material, fences, McDonalds fry containers, and screen printing frames. I brought with me a bag containing a roll of latex and chains as a “gift.” The newest addition, a work table, has patches of screws and wood up the side, (they had to saw it in half to get it through the door). Natural light filters through the skylight above highlighting the pieces she’s picked out for the visit. “It’s really clean right now,” she says. “My mom has been here all day we’ve been building a frame for storage space,” gesturing to the 2x4 structure across one wall “I’ve been mapping it as we go along”. The space will hopefully give her some much needed space for printers, frames and other objects involved in her making process.
ANNA: You have your hands in all these different processes, 2D, 3D, sculpture.
ZOE: So I went to school to study painting and illustration, I always admired drawing and I picked up painting more formally. Then I found sculpture was also really fun, working with my hands, and I was drawn to found objects and assembling things together was very fun. But I’m still gravitating towards the flat, finding a way to merge both together.
ANNA: You do have a lot of found objects but I really don’t think of them (the paintings) as all found objects.
ZOE: I guess the way I think about it is I want my paintings to feel like they’re trying to escape their own flatness but also very trapped in their flatness.
A concept one can see highlighted in her works. Zoe goes on to describe as many of her works come from contradictions, both in materials and concepts. A beginning of a work for her can start out as exploring two completely opposite mediums or ideas. Thinking of a work as a balance of two extremes, many of them a reflection of her own inner being, the objects discovered (industrial or otherwise) often lend themselves as extensions and a “fleshing out,” of her prints and paintings. “I’m really indecisive,” she says laughing.
For the last year and half she says she’s been exploring skin as a concept.
ANNA: What do you mean by that? Like exploring the human body, or purely skin?
ZOE: Well I feel like a lot of my paintings can universally translate, especially to Gen Z culture but the idea is more feeling comfortable in my own skin. That comes with a lot of contradictions in itself, from being a young woman and not knowing what I want to do, what I want to be, living in LA…There’s a lot of longing, wishing and comparing.
The conversation swings into gender and being a woman, and what that means in our modern day. Comparison in both the online and the added pressure that comes from Los Angeles (where Zoe has lived her whole life) has us discussing the inherent tension one has just as a girl in the art world. “There’s a lot of tension,” she says “there is a lot of inherent comparison and pressure of perfection that comes with being a young woman in this space, and the attempt towards perfection feels inauthentic to me most times but it’s something I am drawn to participate in.” In the process of her art making itself Zoe finds inspiration in the attempt of balancing this internal tension. Stepping away from the time and pressure of hyper-realistic painting Zoe has found a niche in the combination of printing, painting, screen printing, and drawing. “I’m a control freak,” she laughs, “you can’t always tell with my work, but I am.” The sharpness and immediacy of printing speaking also to the immediacy of our digital age, and her own generation. Internet sayings and images she is often referencing in her work float up through the ether, photocopies of photocopies, it is this understanding that we are a long ways from home.
ZOE: There’s always this grasp for me to try to find this in between, art making is that process of working towards that, not even necessarily getting closer.
ANNA: It’s like attempt towards the grey, the attempt towards some kind of acceptance
ZOE: Acceptance is hard!
ANNA: Acceptance is really hard!
ZOE: There’s a lot of acceptance, realizing you’ve been working really hard on something and then realizing you’ve been wrong. Or just being accepting of those mistakes you make in your 20s. That’s why I always like playing with the ironic aspect of a work too. We live in such an imbalanced time…I’ve just been trying to explore what happiness means to me, but not knowing what that is. Kinda like this frame, -she laughs- I’m just building it as I go.
She goes on to discuss how she’s been feeling a tug to leave Los Angeles, a city she has for the majority of her life been in love with, and the fear that comes with the shedding of a life you’ve been content with. The motifs she’s been using of cars and skin having prominence in her work as they represent objects of movement, armor of our homes, with the added irony of driving a branded object. “Both our skin and cars are homes we can move with,” she says, “both are objects of transition, but it’s also just like a Honda CRV.” Reflecting on her past work that read more as “internet paintings,” her current focus she would describe as more in line with confusing images, where the viewer has a harder time deciphering what has been manipulated, twisted, and touched by the artist while still referencing some aspects of pop culture. “I feel less drawn to integrate a lot internet culture now though,” she says, marking a shift in her present and future body of work, “I’m being as authentic as I can to myself.”
Truly, I try to tell her, I believe she is walking a very intriguing and skillful line into the “new.” For the most part she would define her work as paintings and after speaking with her I would tend to agree. However in the realm of both painting and sculpture I believe her pieces are on the forefront of both a reaction and action involving modern life. Her pieces scattered throughout the studio do not seem to be in a state of flux or in process but rather seem to be made in full form like a newborn colt. Straddling the line between inhuman and fully human. Zoe’s works catch you in your own reflection. The materials themselves are machine and industrial but manipulated in such a way that the feeling coming through is soulful and downright universal. The gummy resin, discarded fast food containers, and text lends itself to a human touch, a comfortability of body, and an exploration of truth in this life experience. Her work and intention reminds me of labyrinths, of being caught between two mirrors, action and reaction, an embodiment of the journey being the destination. This present era, not always light, not always understood, Zoe Alameda is figuring it out and bringing us along for the ride.
If you are interested in Zoe’s work you can find more at her website or instagram. Her next show will be “Car Show,” in Los Angeles in May with Ashlynn Trane.