Waiting to Be Found

About

In Waiting to Be Found,  Allié takes the mundane, the motions of city life, discarded items, and an ignored, forgotten subset of people forced to settle in places not designed to be inhabited, and captures their impermanent migrations by utilizing the ephemeral materials with which they engage. Allié’s work focuses on the concept of shared public domain-specifically the streets of bustling urban settlements- and the effect they have on the people who occupy them and the objects with which they interact on a constant basis.  Through her use of tattered, discarded found materials and the reconstructed impressions the inhabitants of these areas, notably can-collectors and the homeless, she explores how figures and objects are altered by and grow to encapsulate their transitory nature. Both the figures she creates, as well the space into which she places them, are fragile and unstable. They are ill-defined and unrestrained by their surroundings, existing in a fleeting “in-between” state. Rather than focusing on the architecture or location itself, Allié studies and isolates people’s everyday motions and actions and gives them a new space to exist.

Waiting to Be Found combines Allié’s collages, collograph prints, installations, fabric sculptures, and mixed media pieces to present figures fusing with their surroundings, bordering on abstraction. Bodies are fragmented, often reduced to just their outlines and silhouettes. Recognizable facial features are obscured, broken down, and reduced to their bare essentials. Abandoned debris, human beings, and the movement of the streets are coalesced and reformed into hybrid entities. Streets are depicted as a powerful, transformative force. Objects caught and battered in their flow retain the energy of those who traverse these passages. Merged into their environment, her subjects become a type of cryptid or lost spirit, eerily human yet an entirely different being.
 

Fanny Allié was born in Montpellier, South of France in 1981. She graduated from Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie (The National School of Photography) in Arles, France in 2005 and moved to New York City shortly after graduating.

Princeton University, DOT Art, A.I.R Gallery, New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, Fresh Window gallery, Chashama and St Eustache Church in Paris, France have organized solo exhibitions of Allié’s work. Freight + Volume Gallery, Field Projects, BRIC Rotunda Gallery, Dekalb Gallery/Pratt Institute and The Bronx Museum among others have featured her work in group exhibitions.

Allié’s work has appeared in the New York Times, NY Magazine, Brooklyn Magazine, Hyperallergic, Le Monde Diplomatique, DNA Info, Marie Claire Italy and Artspace Magazine. In April 2017, Allié installed her interactive, community-based and participatory public art sculpture Exquisite Corpse in collaboration with DOT Art and A.I.R Gallery in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.

In June 2017, she was awarded the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop Studio Immersion Fellowship. During February-April 2018, Princeton University (Woodrow Wilson School) is organizing a solo show of her work. Allié lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.