DELANEY ALLEN // painting a portrait
On view April 6 - April 29, 2012
Opening reception First Friday April 6, 6-9 p.m.
- “I’m just a guy trying to put his life back together” —Tom Berenger’s character in "Major League"
- Why do I continue to let fruit rot?
- List making (random girls I’m not going home with; my encounters in Las Vegas (or lack thereof in such a populated, drunken city); places I was last to leave from)
- Lyrics for “Another Saturday Night”
- Various notes from Drake interviews
We tend to identify ourselves through others- I am her son, their friend, his girlfriend... But how do we find ourselves when we are alone? In Painting a Portrait, his second solo exhibition at Nationale, Delaney Allen attempts such a discovery. His photographs are not so much traditional portraits but evocations of his journeys, mindset, interests, and experiments. Revealing through concealing, delineating through obscuring, faces are masked, bodies camouflaged, and romantic landscapes blurred through car windows. The resulting visions are innately personal yet, at the same time, reverberate with an elementary spirit. Loneliness, emptiness, confusion, and longing- Allen’s days unfold like scrawls from a hidden notebook. While we never see his face, we are handed a foundation, and through his palette of de-saturated colors and hazy lighting, the feelings of a single man emerge.
BIO
Born in Fort Worth, TX, Delaney Allen received his MFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2010. His photographs have been shown nationally and internationally, most notably at Foam Museum in Amsterdam, NL. Additionally, he has self-published three books, one of which was included in Photo-Eye Magazine’s “Best Of” list for 2010 (Between Here And There). His work has been featured in a number of print publications including Nylon Magazine and France’s Tell Mum Everything Is OK. Allen currently lives and works out of Portland, OR where he is represented by Nationale.
To request a price list for this exhibition, please email info@nationale.us