Alicia LaChance

Alicia LaChance makes large scale, process driven paintings built up through layers of acrylic, casein, latex and spray paint on a fresco-secco ground over canvas. Mark making involves traditional brushwork, sign maker’s techniques, silk screen, taping, powdered pigment stains, scraping and sanding. LaChance’s work conveys a layering and compression of multicultural traditions and art historical references, from ancient folk traditions to street art. Her highly worked paintings use open source graphs as compositional map and armature to hang intellectual ideas from as they relate to pushing boundaries in abstraction and process, as well as, pulling in contemporary social cues.

LaChance creates a color code derived from shared palettes across cultures. The use of open source data visualization for composition appealed to the artist for their botanical nature. The architecture of the graphs dictates multi-spoked compositions that operate as character sets. The artist charges each ‘deck’ with a graphic language or semiotics that hint at the possibility of an Esperanto, or universal language. Inherently, as the density of patterns, colors and symbols compile, an abstract arena takes place at center. The work reads with a simultaneity that can be at once flat and labyrinthine, tornadic map-like marks that feel like urban landscape , while too, a field of Jungian shadows and light. The paintings want to read as an extension of nature and echo of our accelerated modernity, a cacophony of single voices mashed up in a 21st century pull for order and stasis. The paintings read with no beginning or end but a sense of evolution – a plot pointed to mark where we are now.