About

Alana Bartol is an interdisciplinary Canadian artist whose work examines resource extraction, petropropaganda, and concepts of remediation. Through methods that blend research with ritual, participation, and sensory experience, Alana creates site-responsive projects that interrogate the narratives sustaining extractive industries and settler colonial, capitalist relationships with land, water, and what are colonially known as natural resources. Rooted in local contexts, embodied knowledge, and more-than-human relations, their work explores how we come into relation with place amidst the ongoing violences of resource extraction.

Longlisted for Canada’s Sobey Art Award in 2019 and 2021, they hold an MFA from Wayne State University (Detroit) and a BFA (Honours with Distinction) from the University of Windsor. Their work has been presented nationally and internationally in exhibitions, festivals, and public spaces, including Walter Phillips Gallery, Plug In ICA, Art Gallery of Alberta, Art Windsor-Essex, Surrey Art Gallery, Dunlop Art Gallery, the Canadian War Museum, Museo de la Ciudad (Guadalajara), DiverseWorks (Houston), Images Festival, InterAccess, Critical Distance, and HOLD FAST Festival. Their video work has screened in Colombia, Argentina, Belgium, Turkey, Hong Kong, the U.S., and at the Berlin Feminist Film Festival.

Often developed collaboratively, Alana’s projects move between humour, absurdity, and poetic or material approaches. Drawing on histories of divination, labour, and the figure of the witch, their work asks how we might reimagine relationships with land and water, centring the intertwined health of human and more-than-human communities, including the plants, animals, insects, and ecologies that shape and sustain these sites.

Working across drawing, experimental video, performance, installation, and socially engaged art, Alana’s practice has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Calgary Arts Development. Their work has appeared in Esse, Sculpture Magazine, Canadian Art, C Magazine, and The Senses and Society, and they have participated in residencies with Eastern Edge Gallery, Santa Fe Art Institute, Banff Centre, the City of Calgary, Empire of Dirt, and the Canadian Forces Artist Program.

An Assistant Professor in the School of Visual Art at Alberta University of the Arts, Alana is committed to fostering artistic growth. They have mentored artists through programs with Connexion ARC, the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, and the Alberta Media Arts Alliance Society (AMMAS).

Alana is a white settler with ancestry that includes Danish, German, English, Irish, and Scottish roots. Born in Mi’kmaq territory and having spent most of their life in the territory of the Anishnaabeg people of the Three Fires Confederacy, they have lived in Mohkinstsis (Calgary, Alberta) since 2015, on the ancestral lands of the Blackfoot people. They thank the artists, curators, technicians, administrators, writers, funders, and communities, human and more-than-human, that make their work possible.

Photo: Cherry Wood

Contact
hello@alanabartol.com
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