Plato is thrilled to announce Alic Brock's solo exhibition, When Shadows Forget Their Master, on view from October 10 through November 15, with a public reception scheduled for Friday, October 10 from 6 to 8pm.
Atlanta-based painter Alic Brock has developed a practice that merges digital manipulation with painterly precision. Brock creates compositions that explore spaces between waking and dreaming, recognition and estrangement. Each work begins as a collage of both found and personal imagery that is intentionally altered and translated to canvas using airbrush acrylics. Fragments of Americana, cultural icons, and private memory mingle in peculiar scenarios where narrative and meaning surface only in retrospect.
Theoretical frameworks of psychoanalysis and film theory provide a conceptual undercurrent for When Shadows Forget Their Master. Jacques Lacan’s orders – Imaginary, Symbolic and Real, Carl Jung’s notion of the shadow, and Mahreen Junaid’s writing on oneiric cinema, exploring the relationship between dreams and filmmaking, helped Brock to cohesively relate found images with those documenting his personal experiences.
For Brock, shadows are not secondary forms, but protagonists in their own right. Like Peter Pan’s mischievous shadow, they slip free of their origin, staging their own dramas across the unfolding storylines. Instead of presenting fixed scenarios for the viewers, the paintings immerse them in illusive states.
Humor and absurdity are central to the atmosphere of When Shadows Forget Their Master. Brock’s paintings balance wit with unease and coherence with disruption, like a dream that hovers between sense and nonsense, to quote Carl Jung. Ultimately, these works do not provide a resolution. Instead, they invite viewers into a suspended state where images rebel against their supposed meanings, shadows forget their master, and stories reveal themselves via prolonged observation and the viewer’s personal experience.
