Keep this mysterious register so that both artists and audiences can fully participate in the mysteries of creation. “There are some things in the painting that don’t have one in the painting.” “There are some things that are inaccessible and indescribable, and the painting can be closer to something that senses or a halo. It’s something you can fight for.”
Allen draws inspiration from her readings and the vast continuum of visual culture, through a symbolic register where the prototype resurfaces through the behavior of the painting itself. Her process becomes a surrender to collective consciousness-a cross-time and geographical extension that constrains human experience through signs of inheritance and shared forms. In the series presented here, the recurring themes of gates, doors and portals introduce tangible and imaginary dynamic tensions that root the audience in sensory reality while gesturing towards something elusive and even beyond.
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Over time, Allen developed a dictionary of personal symbolism, reintroduced elements of early works, and explored the variable properties of symbols with new images – their circulation, through changing beliefs and transformations of cultural power, and their role in shaping human expression across generations. Each painting is filled with a bizarre halo, all seemingly ominous, almost verbal, inspiring shadow truths that resonate now and point to speculative futures.
Shockingly, Allen's image, though deeply transcends, is still in the material reality of her process. She works directly on the original linen, working on labour-intensive levels of layered layers (blue blue, silver and dusty crayons), building each composition through accumulation, deposition and subtraction. “Part of it is how the process works, because it involves light from behind and keeping the light from the light and then dimming the other lights. I'm always deleting and adding, starting to change in this transitional place, and that's when it starts to get more interesting.” By the source of this back and forth between erasing and appearance, Allen uses negative space to evoke depth and brightness as if the light is emitting inside. The canvas becomes a porous threshold between physics and fiction. This unique intuitively guided dictionary of painting was formed in her years of experiments with collage. “I’m starting to be very interested in how flax and oil create these ghost images,” she said. “I’m just starting to focus on the material this way.”
Allen's images usually seem to be dissipating – weird, brief and on the verge of disappearing. “Because of this process and my relationship with the canvas – this slow engraving is in the images – I think if you are willing to participate in these works, the images will almost start to collapse at some point.” By testing the limitations of each image, Allen challenged its durability, making it swing between coherence and collapse. As the French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman said, images that survive in time can still bear the emotional and symbolic accusations of its origin. They become part of the wound, part of the testimony, part of the eternal, but within the temporal class that coexists past, present and future. In Allen's work, images become the location of memory and transformation, keeping this simultaneity in its surface.
In this consciousness, Allen faces the fantasy of painting space, both possibilities and boundaries. “They are not trompe-l'-il,” she clarified. “If you just look at them through the lens of an image, they will fall into this realism category. But if you can interact with them in a more imaginative way, they start to open up and their construction start to reveal.” In this layered approach, paintings act not only as images, but as processes or metaphors of states of existence. “They ended up talking about these different conditions of the transient and transient nature of survival. They are forming, deforming, developing and disappearing. Destroying and updating images, destroying and painting updates – they feed each other, they are equally important parts of the circle.”
