About NAOMI ALESSANDRA

I stick my fingers into the porous borders between things. My interdisciplinary art practice reckons with the myriad ways in which bodies and objects encounter one another in space—sometimes resulting in deep affinities or new hybrid conglomerations, and other times revealing deeply uncomfortable or repellent power dynamics. These encounters are the visual stories that I frame and reframe, utilizing tools of painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, and language.

Current projects include investigations of enclosures and circumscribed spaces as material and metaphorical structures. These are structures within which bodies can be simultaneously protected and restrained, and without which bodies may be excluded, endangered and ‘free’. I consider both the socially-constructed and the materially-constituted aspects of boundaries that define objects, human identities, and spatial-political relations. In the process of piecing together hybrid assemblages of paintings and drawings on paper, recycled plastics, decaying plant matter, and other found objects, a central tension emerges between my desire to draw literal and figurative borders around things and a simultaneous yearning for the encroachments, breaches, mergings, and escapes that inevitably occur.

I am currently working toward dual graduate degrees—an MFA in Studio Art and MA in the History and Theory of Contemporary Art—at the San Francisco Art Institute. I have shown my work in solo and group exhibitions around the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. In 2020, I was the recipient of the Pirkle Jones Visual Artist Support Program Grant, and was Max Thelen Artist in Residence at Art Works Downtown in San Rafael in 2018. I currently sit on SFAI's Board as the Graduate Student Trustee.