My work stimulates unconscious emotions, desires and sexual compulsions, all unified within a dynamic that vacillates between the real and the fantasized. I explore issues related to madness and alienation as they exist in contemporary culture, concentrating on expressions of neurosis, on feelings of anxiety, displacement and loss of identity. These emotions are depicted in terms of visual conflict through my imagery, and manifested in terms of grotesque exaggeration
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Obscure Discomforts – Alison Brady
My work stimulates unconscious emotions, desires and sexual compulsions, all unified within a dynamic that vacillates between the real and the fantasized. I explore issues related to madness and alienation as they exist in contemporary culture, concentrating on expressions of neurosis, on feelings of anxiety, displacement and loss of identity. These emotions are depicted in terms of visual conflict through my imagery, and manifested in terms of grotesque exaggeration. While investigating issues related to the unconscious, elements such as eroticism, twisted humor and horror come across. I strive to create dichotomies between the sensual and the horrific, the beautiful and the destructive; the result, I hope, is a body of work comprised of deeply emotional and disturbing depictions of the unknown, staged imagery that functions on a metaphorical level and inanimate objects and settings serving to illustrate the inner workings of the unconscious.
Each staged tableaux intends to prod at obscure discomforts in the viewer—the idea of violation, of trauma, of those lucid moments whose unreality is escalated to a sort of super-reality, is essential. Freud’s idea, expressed in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” that “oftentimes we tend to repeat a traumatic event over and over even until it becomes pleasurable,” should apply to the viewer’s experience.
The image should pester the spectator beyond an initial glimpse; it should worm its way into you, demand revisitation, make itself compelling in a troublesome way, like the queasy addiction of prodding a sore on one’s gumline with one’s tongue. This repetition can take the form of dreams, storytelling or even hallucination; my images allude to the cryptic mental re-scrambling through which our traumatic events resurface. When I conceive my images, the questions I ask myself are: “What is the state of normality?,” “How can that normality be subverted, perverted or generally transformed?” and “When does this overcome the real and become psychotic?”
Identity in the models is often effaced, rendering them as ambiguous as a figure half-remembered through the still-dissipating fog of a dream. Though some of these images may suggest slivers of a narrative—the onset of a tropical disease, a detective’s dossier of “Unsolved Cases,” the fulfillment of an elaborate fetish—I imagine them as stand-alone interior realities, as individual traumas, anxieties or erotic compulsions whose objective reality has been reprocessed by a shaken-up mind incapable of facing them head-on, only to re-emerge as an impenetrable hieroglyphics of gesture and texture. The imagery undertakes to tiptoe around the tedious risibility of overt pornography or outright violence, eschewing brute force frontal assault for a deeper, more insidious kind of psychic obscenity. The pictures are not sordid, exactly, but one remembers them as more explicit than they are for the precision of their grotesquerie, just as the close-up body terror of a cracked and oozing fingernail can seem more profane than a mass grave.
