In time with her work being on view in Adorned Self at Sow & Tailor, today's A Portfolio is dedicated to the last few years of works by Los Angeles-based, Alli Conrad.
Alli Conrad (b. 1995) is a Chinese-American artist based in Los Angeles who specializes in simplified realism oil paintings. Conrad describes her work as nostalgic and romantic. In her artistic process, she sources historical photographs and contemplates their relationship to time and how they play with fiction and non-fiction. Conrad extracts figures, specifically unknown women, found in the photographs to examine the impact of identity, femininity and modern culture. She is particularly interested in their body language, silhouettes, and outfits. For Conrad, an outfit’s fabric and folds are very much alive, vocal, in motion, and a container for an indirect emotion. In her canvases, she zooms in and crops the “effortless” folds in the clothing as well as the subject’s hands, examining how they adapt, modify, and move. Through the absence of her faceless characters, Conrad is drawn towards the clues and stories held in both clothing and hand gesture - elements she believes are “just as alive as humans" creating an endless possibility of narratives.
