Aleana Egan: The Sensitive Plant

Aleana Egan’s art defines unique, subjective spaces between fictional worlds and physical realities. Her spare, linear sculptures and studied arrangements of low-key objects are composed of recognizably ordinary and notably practical materials. Slender steel structures are coupled with folded fabrics. Rolls of roofing felt support small, thickly painted cardboard trays. Plastic tape, polyester filler, metal hinges and industrial rivets hold the disparate unadorned components of her sculptures together.  Hard and soft, heavy and light are judiciously contrasted; there is at all times an uncommon, careful attention to the varying textural and spatial presence of common things, idiosyncratically configured.  But while Egan’s sculptures urge us to register the distinct actuality of utilitarian materials, their specific, enigmatic forms have in each case more immaterial sources. Crucially, the ‘real things’ of Egan’s art most often evolve as responses to the ‘unreal things’ of literary narrative.  Reading is fundamental to Egan’s artistic process, but literary allusion is never obviously present in a realized work. Rather, encounters with literature are moments of initiation. Her work thrives on occasions when scenes, objects, characters or even atmospheres from stories become isolated in memory and slowly transformed by thought and sensation. Through her concentrated, intuitive efforts to translate such fictional residues into something immediate, permanent and present in our world, newly remarkable shapes and spaces, new situations of seeing and sensing, become possible.