Ali O’Leary

About the Artist

Ali is a mixed-media artist who lives and works in Atlanta, GA. She grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and received her Bachelors from Barnard College at Columbia University in New York City. O’Leary earned a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD and I went on to receive a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2013. Before returning to the South, She worked in New York City for several years in a fashion design studio and for an architecture firm. She has experience teaching art and design to a wide range of students as well as doing freelance work in the Photography, Fashion and Publishing. She has exhibited in galleries across the Southeast and currently works as an Adjunct Professor of Art at University of North Georgia and Georgia Military College.

www.alioleary.com
@alipageoleary

Artist Statement

Our current world is mediated through a screen where images are both literally flat and thin while depicting texture and volume in high resolution. We yearn for the most luscious images while our relationship to tangible and archival objects dwindles and erodes. Our connection to our body and environment becomes secondary to their digital representation on social media.

In this series of artwork I combine handcrafted embroideries of Minecraft landscapes and fauna with digital photographs. The final work is a digital collage of the photograph and embroidery printed on fabric and re-stitched or quilted back into in order to create textures that invite touch confuse the viewer with what is printed and what is three-dimensional. I hope these works cause one to reflect on how we our changing our relationship to the tactile and question how we navigate back and forth between digital flat spaces and our physical, tactile world.

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