Cosmic Zoo, Christina Allan

About

As the gallery celebrates its one-year anniversary, the Parsons graduate will present allegorical new works that represent the mothership of all conspiracy theories: aliens, the extra-terrestrial creatures that chime with our deepest and most primal fears. 

For her largest body of work to date, Allan’s precisely detailed, airbrushed, colour-leached paintings were first inspired by extra-terrestrial documentary Unacknowledged. The documentary, first released in 2017, drew the artist down into the original rabbit hole.

Since leaving New York and returning to Toronto, Allan has been propelled towards a colour-splashed painting narrative that evoked mystical enquiries that are as timeless as they are universal. The current work, COSMIC ZOO taps into Allan’s personal interest in the mysteries of the universe, cosmology and the unknown. Her concerns are primal, sensationalised, reflecting her own obsessions and most likely, our own.

Drawing inspiration from her own spirituality, theories and hypotheses of the universe, her works reference the Simulation Hypothesis; the Zoo Hypothesis, ufology and popular culture. For decades, film and TV fascination with aliens has reflected ourselves – our fears, anxieties, hopes – long before a Senate report took them seriously. Since her graduation from Parsons, Allan’s vision and work has been powered by the universal questions that throw back more questions than answers.

For COSMIC ZOO, Allan has taken a step-forward into the zeitgeist, where she depicts the otherworldly aspects of God-like figures directing our fate. Allan reasons that this is perhaps best summarised by Barack Obama. Allan states that the former US President’s blunt assessment in May 2021 on the videos of unidentified ariel phenomenon summarised our collective enquiry when he stated, “We don’t know exactly what they are.”

Christina Allan’s Aliens

Christina Allan concurs; it comes down, she believes, down to curiosity and the drive to seek answers beyond our human reach. “I wanted to present a world where we, as humans, were pawns, controlled by these God-like figures,” she says by way of explanation.  “Surveys consistently show that about a third of all Americans think alien spaceships are real — and that as much as 10 percent of the population claim to have seen such spaceships”, she adds. Even if the physical evidence is of intelligent life on other planets is flimsy, there is a theory that they are among us. Past and present Allan wanted to explore this energy in her work: human, alien, other and voyagers of the great beyond – it’s the ultimate experimental trope that will continue to haunt, endure and fascinate each generation.