About

Alana Bartol (she/they) 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.

Alana’s work has been presented in exhibitions, festivals, and public spaces across Canada and internationally. They were longlisted for Canada’s Sobey Art Award in 2019 and 2021 and hold an MFA from Wayne State University (Detroit) and a BFA, Honours with distinction, from the University of Windsor.

Often developed collaboratively, Bartol’s projects sometimes engage humour and absurdity as critical strategies, while other times take on more poetic or material explorations. Grounded in community-engaged and site-responsive research practices, they combine research into policy and infrastructure with on-the-ground observation and embodied processes to surface the often-invisible systems that enable and sustain resource extraction. 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.

Spanning drawing, experimental video, performance art, sculpture, socially engaged art, public art, installation, and curatorial work, Alana's artwork has been featured in Esse, Canadian Art, Sculpture Magazine, Blackflash Expanded, The Senses and Society, and C Magazine. They have been awarded grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and Calgary Arts Development. Alana has been an artist-in-residence with Eastern Edge Gallery, Santa Fe Art Institute, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Alberta Public Art Network/the City of Calgary, Empire of Dirt, and the Canadian Forces Artist Program.

Alana is an Assistant Professor in the School of Visual Art at Alberta University of the Arts, where they have taught since 2015, first as contract faculty before becoming a permanent faculty member in 2023. In addition to teaching, they have held roles with the Arts Council Windsor & Region, the College for Creative Studies (Detroit), and as a consultant for the Ontario Arts Council. Committed to fostering artistic growth, they have mentored emerging 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: Karin McGinn

Contact
hello@alanabartol.com
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