With a background in archaeology, Priscilla Aleman’s practice retraces ideas around the afterlife, Pre-Columbian cosmology, and the interplay of cultures from the global south. Her Miami upbringing guides her work of understanding of the landscape’s past traditions and its global history. She brings to life her own parallel and intersecting universes spiritually in process and form. Citing the ocean as a connective tissue Priscilla brings together materials collected from related regions throughout the Americas and Caribbean. She incorporates a multitude of deep field research and work to push the process of re-contextualizing old and new worlds. The arrangement of materials in her sculptural installations lends itself to be either collector, creator, analyst, believer, or practitioner. These sculptures, akin to offerings or altars, allow Priscilla to chart the waves and ways we are interconnected. Priscilla is inspired by powerful spiritual beings, their variations in written and oral histories and how they shape our understanding of ecological and energetic fields. She equates the practice of thoughtful assemblage with care and ritual, connecting the physical and sacred realms.
At the core of her work is the preservation of memory. Utilizing materials that have shaped human culture, she inspires a sense of wonder and reminds us of the sacred cycle of life and death by creating body casts. For Priscilla, the mother molds (a term used in sculpture that she poetically plays with) remind her of ‘my body’s own generative power to recreate’ Casting - an intimate experience between herself and her subjects (her friends and family members) - becomes part of many of her works. Field research drives Priscilla’s process, and can encompass anything from field excavations with local archaeologists to free-form time spent in the ocean, in her backyard, or in botanical centers around the world. During these moments in the field, Priscilla intuitively collects relics- seeds, fruits, rocks, shells, materials that enact memories- while observing and registering her own spiritual experience. Back in the studio, she archives her findings neatly into groupings while considering how they might make their way into new works. As part of her wayfinding, in her newest series of works she uses cut-outs of National Geographic magazines as the backdrop for assemblage works. These series of collages are meditations using her collection of vintage national geographic magazines. Priscilla excavates into the magazines by cutting, folding, tearing, relaying and encasing the pages in resin. She highlights and conceals content with color, tropical plant materials from around the world, fragments of architecture, textiles, and personal relics. The collages are meditations into color, contentious history, and exchanges between worlds, like dreamscapes. In these dreamscapes she allows for meaning to emerge and re-contextualize. In dreams we can navigate and create space for new meaning, allowing us to bring new insight and inspiration into the waking world.
Priscilla has recently shown new work with the Wavehill Project Space and YoungArts, who previously named Priscilla a Presidential Scholar in the Arts; she was recently commissioned for a public work by the New York Botanical Garden.