Alison OK "Antarctic Curse: Life Raft" 8x10

Watercolor on 8x10 inch paper in a wood frame.

Alison OK is an Oakland, CA-based artist. Born in Los Angeles, CA, she received a BA in Fine Art from UCLA and an MFA in Fine Art from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Alison is best known for delicate and disturbing watercolors of current events as pictured in the media, manipulated and stripped down to create an eerie post apocalyptic landscape.

My work is a meditation on emotionally charged imagery—in this case, ill-fated explorations of the southern-most continent. I obsessively collect images of expeditions, from the earliest explorers to current day scientists . When isolated from context, the anonymous figures become open-ended emblems, vulnerable to meanings that are distinct from their national or historical affiliations. Through this distillation, the pictures become a locus for multiple discovered themes: man vs. nature, the human condition, imperialism, death, the fragility of the body, the sacred and even intimacy and vulnerability emerge.