About

Alana (Al) Bartol (she/they) is an interdisciplinary Canadian artist whose work explores resource extraction, ecological change, and more-than-human relations. Longlisted for Canada’s Sobey Art Award in 2019 and 2021, she holds an MFA from Wayne State University (Detroit) and a BFA (Honours with Distinction) from the University of Windsor. Working across performance, drawing, installation, participatory art, video, photography, olfactory, and media art, her recent work increasingly considers embodiment, desire, and queer ecology. Her practice is grounded in sustained research and site-responsive inquiry and often involves collaboration. Humour, absurdity, institutional mimicry, and bureaucratic language frequently enter her work as ways of troubling dominant narratives around extraction, responsibility, environmental stewardship, and repair.

Her work has been presented nationally and internationally in exhibitions, festivals, and public spaces, including Walter Phillips Gallery, Remai Modern, Plug In ICA, Art Gallery of Alberta, Art Windsor-Essex, Dunlop Art Gallery, Yukon Arts Centre, Museo de la Ciudad (Guadalajara, Mexico), and DiverseWorks (USA). Her video work has screened internationally, including in Colombia, Argentina, Belgium, Turkey, Hong Kong, Romania, the United States, and at the Berlin Feminist Film Festival. Residencies have taken her across Canada, including to Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and internationally through the Santa Fe Art Institute (USA), the Canadian Forces Artists Program (Latvia), and the ARCUS Project (Japan). Her video work is distributed by Vtape, the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, and Video Pool Media Arts Centre.

Alana Bartol is an Assistant Professor at Alberta University of the Arts. She approaches teaching, mentorship, and curating as connected forms of knowledge sharing, supporting artists at different stages of their practices and engaging people beyond the arts. She has mentored artists through programs at Alberta Media Arts Alliance Society (AMAAS), EMMEDIA, University of Lethbridge Art Galleries, Connexion ARC, and the Emerging Art Writers Program at Illingworth Kerr Gallery.

Alana is a white, queer settler artist with Danish, German, English, Irish, and Scottish ancestry. She has lived in Mohkinstsis (Calgary, Alberta), in Treaty 7 territory, since 2015, on the ancestral lands of the Blackfoot Confederacy and the traditional territories of the Tsuut’ina Nation, the Stoney Nakoda Nations, and the Métis Nation of Alberta, Districts 5 and 6. Her work and research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Calgary Arts Development, and other arts funders and awards. She is grateful to the artists, curators, technicians, administrators, writers, funders, collaborators, and communities (human and more-than-human) who make her work possible.

Contact
hello@alanabartol.com
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Photo: Bryce Krynski