Alissa Polan
Alissa Polan is a queer Jewish artist and curator based in Brooklyn. Using vinyl, paper, and paint, Polan’s collages, photographs, and installations examine the way images are used to stoke desire – not only for the objects themselves, but for the identities and lifestyles they represent. Through the lens of found images from her own life and surrounding media, Polan’s work is an homage to the kind of living the middle class aspires to while being critical of its aspirational origins. She uses images and objects from personal life, including her online shopping history, and combine them with CB2 catalogs, luxury homeware websites, and magazines into surreal orchestrations that center along the themes of climate change, transformation, self-improvement, and self-indulgence.
Her collages and installations have been exhibited in the Museum of Contemporary Art (Arlington, VA), mhPROJECTnyc, (New York, NY), Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, (Sonoma, CA), San Francisco Art Commission (San Francisco, CA), and at NADA 2023 with Paradice Palase, (Brooklyn, NY). She has attended the Joya: arte + ecología / AiR (Andalucía, Spain) residency and is the recipient of the WorkingArtist.org Photography Award. She received her MFA in Sculpture from SFAI (San Francisco, CA).
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