Artist Statement
I am a survivor and a storyteller.
Influenced by my mother’s future and my own Freudian fate, my work navigates experiences of love, grief, vulnerability and hope as well as diasporic healing practices.
The processes I use to create art involve techniques that require muscle memory, training my eye to capture arresting moments and imparting my own experiences in a way that relates to the universal language of remembering. My images of everyday Black life and the figures that blend into those environments arise from a need to consider how life is shaped through singular perspectives. I'm driven to create in order to document and uplift stories of marginalized people in the hopes of healing from our trauma. Through sharing narratives and finding common threads that unify community, my work across mediums contribute to our rich and complex history.
I use self-portraiture to document the limitless states of Self, in flesh and the Spirit, identity, and gender expression through a queer lens. In my current work, I utilize painting and sculpture. My paintings embody emotionality through color and the tactile nature of creating serpentine forms across planes. This embarkment into new media presents new challenges in how I communicate through art and also introduces new modalities of coping with my personal history. I operate in the belief that memory, as active and vegetate liminal spaces, serves as an anchorage to reclaim identity.
The components that make up my practice are all derived from my own healing process and my investigation into the role of collective healing within the African Diaspora.
Bio:
Raised and bred on the Southside of Chicago, Biance Alebiosu is a multidisciplinary artist. They work in media that activate living memory through sculpture, installation and photographic processes. They obtained their BA in Studio Art at Chicago State University in 2017. They received scholarships quarterly during their undergraduate program based on the strength and merit of their distinctive coursework. Since participating in the Art Institute of Chicago's Andrew W. Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Summer Academy, they have explored independent fine arts curatorial opportunities.
During their undergraduate career they have exhibited at several galleries in cities such as Chicago, IL, Oshkosh, WI and Acme, MI as well as receiving numerous honorable mentions for their photography work. Their budding art practice is continually driven by community engagement, deeply situated introspection, and the research of tangible and ephemeral materiality in quotidian rituals.
They currently live and work in Chicago, IL.