ALANNAH FARRELL

Solastalgia is a term coined by environmental philosopher Glenn Albrect in 2003. It is a composite word referring to the mixed feelings of solace, desolation, and pain experienced as the result of the immediate loss or assaulting changes to one’s home environment. While it relates particularly to the effects of facing ecological disasters resulting from the climate crisis, Farrell’s usage expands the term, reflecting broadly on the emotional heaviness of facing second or third-order effects including civic neglect, population collapse, and increasingly grave economic situations. This exhibition is a poignant ode to the rural community in the remote southern tier region of New York State where Farrell grew up. Coupling scenes of decaying architecture with tender portrait paintings for which the artist is best known, Farrell builds a visual story of an altered reality that contemplates the unbearable strangeness and overwhelming beauty of a place changing while one is living in it.

Inspired by the eerie imagery of George Tooker, Hans Bellmer, and erotic compositions by photographer Pierre Molinier, Farrell’s depictions of their life and surroundings appear as near-cinematic scenes rife with psychodrama. In a double portrait, Surrender and Longing, two nude figures crowd the foreground of a train crossing. As one bends over the other, wrapping their arms and torso around the crawling figure, their tight pose compresses against the lower half of the composition. The pair are bathed in the light of a hazy, yet brilliant sundown and the silence of a completely deserted main street in the near distance.

Farrell’s paintings are always painted from life, registering the importance of personal relationships and the particulars of the environments in which the compositions unfold. There are scenes of emptied parking lots, vacant commercial spaces, and the exhibition’s titular painting, which depicts a condemned school auditorium viewed through a shattered window pane, each rendered with the same sensitivity they approach portraiture. During the year Farrell worked on the exhibition, multiple sites were demolished or shuttered forever, heightening the elegiac quality of the works and the feeling of a world slipping away. Dirtied snowbanks, rusting iron, peeling paint, empty store shelves, and forgotten objects are the textures that speak to bleak realities of neglect, entropy, and time’s steady, downward pull.

Against this backdrop, a portrait called Benjamin (Iron Pond) shows a nude male crouching in a white bathtub, surrounded by dense houseplants. Leaning forward, his gaze averted, he tends to the vines and flowers with his watering can. As with many of Farrell’s portraits, the parenthetical in their titles indicate particulars related to the subject or sometimes where the painting was made. In this case, Iron Pond refers to the name of this man’s antique shop in the town. The portrait speaks to an unusual concentration on care and cultivation, amidst Farrell’s depictions of decay, and speaks to the difficulty of remaining in place while the world around one changes, deteriorates, or is forgotten.

Light binds these different modes of looking and varied subject matter together: streetlamps cast luminous cones across wet pavement, railroad signals flash across skin, fluorescent grocery fixtures glow with saturated color, and bodies emerge from night-darkened landscapes. Farrell’s heightened palette—of greens and reds and oranges—transforms ordinary surroundings into radioactive fields of tension. The people and places they observe with equal specificity and empathy, grounding the exhibition’s sense of loss in the material details of a community on the brink of total collapse.

Alannah Farrell (b. 1988, Kingston, NY) is a queer painter who lives and works in New York. Farrell completed their BFA at The Cooper Union, New York, NY in 2011. Recent solo exhibitions include Erect, Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown, NY; Serenade, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; and I Want To Thank You, Harper’s, New York, NY. They have exhibited their work in group exhibitions at galleries including Warnes Contemporary, New York, NY; Bitter Gallery, New York, NY; Friedrichs Pontone Gallery, New York, NY; Fragment, New York, NY; Karma, New York; NY; Lyles & King, New York, NY; Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX; Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica, CA; The Painting Center, New York; Theirry Goldberg Gallery, New York; UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles; and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York. Farrell’s work is in the permanent collection of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.