Alison Brady photographs with an eye towards capturing our unconscious emotions, desires and sexual compulsions. Subjects are harvested then placed in meticulously curated settings and costumes that ping pong between the real and the fantastic. Morbid fascination of contrasts as polar as the sacred and profane populate her work and grip you. An underlying tension of madness and alienation seeps out from the edges of the compositions. Brady hones in on expressions of neurosis, anxiety, displacement and loss of identity that permeate the contemporary human condition. Translating these unseen, but very deep feelings, into visual metaphors of grotesque exaggeration then staging them against banal middle-class suburban backdrops compounds the dynamism of her art. Each image is an immediate impression akin to the flash in a mind’s eye that has dissapeared but exists in the sticky corners of where our contradictory compulsions live, which in Brady’s world are usually covered in tacky wallpaper and generic homeliness.

With her new exhibition, Sincerely Yours, Brady further dives into the trauma of our lives. Whether your pesonal trauma may have been a break within your body physically or mentally, a severed relationship, a loss of home, we all know the guttural hysteria and crushing panic of trauma. Brady embraces this tenant by looking at how contradictions and distinctions between our public and private dialogs unfold. In many ways, her work looks like a dream as she aims to delve into where these moments live and breathe and how they resurface. Brady obscures faces and focuses on the body’s language and gestures to highlight the truth of our inner landscapes. Sincerely Yours as a statement in relation to these ideas is a quite dramatic and ironic title.

Instability is also clearly at play in Brady’s work. She examines where the borderline is between healthy cognition and digestion and where the balance tips to the obsessive, subverted, perverted or psychotic. The physical manifestations of the storming issues of our unconscious she depicts as awkward scenarios, off-kilter poses and simply weird juxtapositions. Her use of matter, in particular food stuffs like spaghetti or olive loaf or bread dough, pasted on the skin heighten the sensation of oddity as well as blur comprehension enough to create trompe l’oeil. Poignant and uncomfortable, Brady’s work also has a sense of whimsy and humor. If you can take the next step past the “oddness”, you catch yourself in a chuckle and empathetic. We have all had days like these.

Alison Brady has been featured in exhibitions with Massimo Audiello, Kirkland Arts Center, Kopeikin Gallery, BAM, Prague Biennale, Randall Scott Gallery, Woom Gallery and the House of Campari among others. Critical attention has been paid to Brady’s work by Time Out New York, The New York Times, NY Arts, Honrmand Mag zine, Rojo Magazine, The Morning News and Eyemazing among others. Moreover, Brady was named as one of the top emerging artists to watch by the Saatchi Gallery and is included in the permanent collections of Elton John and the West Collection.