Alison Overton
 
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Alison Overton



About the Artist

A native of North Carolina and life-long artist, Alison Overton has been photographing since 1980. She earned a 1982 Bachelor of Environmental Design degree from North Carolina State University’s School of Design.

Alison was awarded Regional Artists Project Grants for 2002, 2004 and 2008 from the North Carolina Arts Council. Her work has been exhibited in New York, Colorado, West Virginia, South Carolina, Virginia, Texas, Maryland, and in over 100 exhibits in North Carolina. Corporate collections include NCSU's Gregg Museum of Art and Design, Credit Suisse First Boston, Saks Fifth Avenue, SAS Institute, and the City of Raleigh.

Alison lives in a funky old bungalow in Raleigh with her husband, son and little dachshund. She spends her nights making gelatin silver prints in her home darkroom and her days hand-tinting, matting and framing the prints at her Artspace studio.


About the Work
Making art, in particular photographs that chronicle a moment in a changing landscape, is my passion. As a lifelong artist, I strive constantly to explore and expand my definition of the unique and mysterious in life and nature. I love to utilize simple, manual film cameras such as the Holga and the Widelux to capture images that have an ethereal and timeless quality. My hope is, that when a person views my art work, he or she might feel as if they could trade places with Alice of “Alice Through the Looking Glass” - peering into a dreamy world, with a sense of awe and child-like wonder.

One of the recurring themes in my work is the architectural landscape with a sense of history. My intent in making these photographs is to visually convey the feeling of walking alone among majestic sites, both secular and sacred: abbeys, castles, churches, cemeteries, formal and informal gardens. By combining overlapping exposures, careful cropping and overpainting with transparent oil paints, the finished works reveal my idea of these places as they might appear in a daydream or on another plane of existence, and as if our rules of time, space and perspective did not apply.


Resume
Click on the above title to open resume as 130KB PDF file.