Alana Bartol

Assistant Professor, Painting

Alana Bartol (she/they) comes from a long line of water witches. Their site-responsive artworks explore divination, ritual, and dreaming as ways of understanding across places, species, and bodies. Their practice-led research aims to create dialogues with and between publics by employing participatory and socially engaged practices on intersecting issues in ecology. Through collaborative and individual projects, Bartol examines our relationships with the Earth, the elements, and what are colonially known as natural resources. Some driving questions are: how can art disrupt fictions that enable and preserve extractive colonial projects? What does remediation look like in the face of mounting liabilities from fossil fuel industries?

alana-bartol-owaa-1.jpeg

Profile Photo by Karin McGinn

Bartol holds a BFA from the University of Windsor (Canada) and an MFA from Wayne State University (USA). In 2019 and 2021, they were long listed for Canada’s Sobey Art Award representing Prairies and North. Bartol's work has been presented in exhibitions and festivals in Mexico, Germany, Hong Kong, Belgium, Romania, Argentina, Turkey, Colombia, the U.S., and across Canada. They are represented by VivianeArt and their video work is distributed by Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, Vtape, and Video Pool.

Of Danish, German, English and Scottish ancestry, Bartol is a white settler Canadian currently based in Treaty 7 Territory in Mohkinstsis (Calgary, Alberta), where they have taught at the Alberta University of the Arts since 2015. They are grateful to the collaborators, artists, curators, mentors, technicians, arts workers, writers, funders, and communities, including the more-than-human communities, that have made creating and sharing their work possible.

 

Selected Grants and Awards

Longlist, Prairies and North, Sobey Art Award, 2019, 2021

Individual Artist Grant, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, 2018, 2021

Research and Development Grant, Canada Council for the Arts, 2021

Individual Artist Grant, Calgary Arts Development, 2020

Concept to Realization Grant, Canada Council for the Arts, 2018

Project Grant to Visual Artists, Canada Council for the Arts, 2016

Emerging Artist Grant, Visual Arts, OAC, 2014

National and International Residency Grant, OAC, 2014

Multi-Integrated Arts Grant, OAC, 2013

Emerging Artist Award, Windsor Endowment for the Arts, 2013

Thomas C. Rumble Fellowship, Wayne State University, 2007-08         

 

Selected Professional Activities

Whispers In the Air, Images Festival, Tkaronto/Toronto, ON, curator: Jaclyn Quaresma, 2023.

all roses sleep (inviolate light), with Bryce Krynski, Art Gallery of Alberta, amiskwaciy-wâskahikan/Edmonton, AB, 2022; Whyte Museum of the Rockies, Banff, AB, 2023, organized by the Art Gallery of Alberta and curated by Lindsey Sharman.

Processes of Remediation: art, relationships, nature, University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, Sikookotoki/Lethbridge, AB, curated by: Josephine Mills, 2021; Dunlop Art Gallery, Sherwood Village Branch, Regina, SK, curated by Tomas Jonsson, 2021-2022.

Remediation Room, an artistic response to the United Conservative Party’s Canadian Energy Centre aka the Energy War Room, with artists Christina Battle, Tamara Lee Anne Cardinal, Rita McKeough, Nurgül Rodriguez, Mia Rushton + Eric Moschopedis, curated by Alana Bartol, 2021-2022.

Groundwork, Critical Distance Centre for Curators, Tkaronto/Toronto, ON, curator: Valérie Frappier, 3-person with Ileana Hernandez Camacho and Tsēmā Igharas, featured exhibition of Scotiabank CONTACT Festival, 2021.

TOTAL FIELD, Official Selection, Berlin Feminist Film Week; Official Selection, GRRL HAUS CINEMA, Boston, MA, USA; Horizontal Variances, SK Filmpool, Regina, SK, curators: Colton Bates & Amber Christensen, 2018.

Orphan Well Adoption Agency, Latitude 53, amiskwaciy-wâskahikan/Edmonton, AB, 2019-2020.

If the river ran upwards, Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, AB, curator: Jacqueline Bell, 2018.

 

Selected Publications

Frappier, Valérie. “Dowsing for Remediation with Alana Bartol.” C Magazine, Extraction, no. 152, Autumn 2022, pp. 32-36.

Alana Bartol and Bryce Krynski (all roses sleep inviolate light). Art Gallery of Alberta, 2022. Text by Lindsey Sharman, https://issuu.com/youraga2015/docs/bartol_and_krynski_epub.

Gismondi, Chris. “Creative Conjuring, Ritual, and Place: Amanda Amour-Lynx’s Skite’kmujuawti in Conversation with the Works of James Gardner, Alana Bartol, and Jamie Ross.” esse magazine, New New Age, no. 105, May 2022, pp. 42-51.

Borsato, Diane, and Amish Morrell, editors. Outdoor School: Contemporary Environmental Art. Douglas and McIntryre, 2021, 155-159.

Kim, Areum. “When Oil is Our Life Blood.” Canadian Art, Climates, fall 2018, pp. 98-101.

Crocker, Eva. “Hold Fast Contemporary Arts Festival.” Canadian Art Online, 20 Aug 2018.

Frappier, Valérie. “Alana Bartol: Orphan Well Adoption Agency, Edmonton, Latitude 53, 7 December 2018 – 26 January 2019.” The Senses and Society, Vol 14 (2), 2019, pp. 249-252, DOI: 10.1080/17458927.2019.1614299.

Orphan Well Adoption Agency. Latitude 53, 2019. Texts by Lindsey Sharman and Lou Sheppard.

Hanna, Maeve. “Review: Alana Bartol.” Sculpture Magazine, July/August 2018, p. 70.

Blume, Libby, and Rosemary Weatherson. “Queering the Campus Gender Landscape through Visual Arts Praxis.” Queer Landscapes: Mapping Queer Space(s) of Praxis and Pedagogy, edited by Oakleaf Lunn, Elizabeth McNeiland James Wermers, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 71-103.

Rodney, Lee. Looking Beyond Borderlines: North America’s Frontier Imagination. Routledge, 2016, pp. 109-110.

Learn more:

alanabartol.com