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"Turtle VeVe", mixed media composite, minimum 13"x19"
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"My art addresses parallel themes of Native American
cultural reawakening and human kinship with the environment. It reflects the organic
beauty I find in the elements of nature and invokes the concept of transformation,
often using southeastern burial mound imagery. My work is influenced by traditional
Chinese painting techniques, which I studied in Beijing in the early eighties. This
disciplined training taught me to capture the random configurations of trees, mountains
and water and to portray the essential contrasts found in nature.
Being of mixed ethnicity, I see my work as a form of reconciliation, where the unsettled
fragments of my eclectic life experience are sewn together like sections of a patchwork
quilt. By piecing together photographic elements with hand rendered paintings, drawings
and relief prints, boundaries between mediums blur to create a hybrid art form. A
conceptual merging takes place through the distillation of organic patterns, human
and animal figures and cultural/historical references. Through this process, multiple
layers of meaning unfold to tell a story of old and new.
I like to think of this work as a window through which one can look inward and outward
at the same time. Ideally, the contemplation of the formal and poetic beauty of a
piece reinforces a sense of connection with, and sensitivity towards, our life support
system, the earth."
-Alyssa Hinton |
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