Artist Statement 

Today my work is mostly retrospective, simply looking, using image and sound processing to enhance and personalize a documented experience, and the camera lens as a window to the world around us. I want to communicate with the viewer, to recreate an experience and show them the way I am seeing something. My body of work is distinguished by collaboration and creative partnerships, some spanning thirty-plus years, because it allows me to exceed the boundaries of my own perspective and awareness.

Moving to the Catskills in 2013, I rediscovered the profound connection I had with the forest and nature early in life. My work regularly incorporates material from the surrounding terrains: lithographs of dried leaves or mushrooms, installations caked in mud and residue offer a faithful tactility to the composition.

I think it is important that as an artist, I develop work about nature that goes beyond its physical beauty, and shows a deep attentiveness to the balance between human presence and the natural world. I have also started to use the technologies of 3-D imaging and modeling as a way of documenting the forest or a wetland. Electronic technology has allowed me ways of defining a natural space using time, sound, and motion. My videotapes no longer function as experimental narratives but electronic paintings that change over time. 

Decades of learning and teaching humanist and post-modern philosophies amplified the political voice behind each piece of work. My graduate work focused on Marxism, Post Marxism and Post Structuralism and the construct of reality as it meshed in electronic media, and defining our reality and existence on Earth. The artwork from 1983—2000 was constructed through a political lens, and culminated with the site-immersive installation “Trump Dump,” a four-year investigation into the political madness that had infected America. It received both national attention and aggressive censorship for turning a mirror on the inflammatory administration and the American culture either embracing it or obstinately trying to erase it as though it didn’t exist.
I am the grandson of a lifelong conservationist and tree farmer; the son of a Jewish socialist who served in Japan following the destruction of WWII. My fine arts education was modernist and formal. Within this triad, my artistic practice—while shifting between mediums and styles countless times over the years—has continually been connected to social progress and human experience.

 Artist Biography

Alan Powell is an electronic media artist working in video and photography, installation, performance, and printmaking. Alan’s 50+ year career has been marked by shifts in medium and embracing technological evolution while his work remains interconnected thematically by two core beliefs: anti-war politics and environmental consciousness. His practice is also deeply embedded in collaboration, community engagement and the democratizing power of video when capturing ordinary people and regular life.

During the 1970s, Alan was a founding member of Electron Movers, a video artist collective that pioneered the integration of electronic tools in communication and art forms including dance, music and optical engineering.

Over five decades, Alan’s work has shown at The Kitchen, Hallswalls, CEPA, and The Museum of the Moving Image in New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia; The Long Beach Museum in California and the Musee d’Arte Moderne in Paris. His videos have been included in the Ithaca Video Festival and the New York Avant Garde Festival (Beavertail Point, 1978), and the Buffalo International Film Festival (COVID Dreams, 2021). Videotapes from Alan’s thirty-year collaboration with Connie Coleman, his late partner, have been broadcast on PBS and are archived at Electronic Arts Intermix in NYC.