Glenna Cole Allee

Bio

Born New York, NY

Education San Francisco Art Institute, MFA, Photography; Reed College, BA, Art

Selected Exhibitions San Francisco Art Institute Graduate Exhibition, Fort Mason, San Francisco, 2007; The Diversity Project, SFAI 2007; SFAI Now! Red Ink Gallery, 2007; Art Digging Show, Live! Exhibit Space, Tokyo, 2006.

Statement

Date palm groves line Highway 111 as it runs from the Mexico/U.S. border north, between the Anza Borrego Desert and the Salton Sea.

The groves form unlikely oases in the desert, fabricated landscapes whose artificiality verges upon mirage. The palms rise in even grids, their repetitive formality interrupted as individual trees list and deviate from carefully plotted symmetry. They are at once elegant, and hazardous. The ladders, beyond human reach, are weathered and at times broken; they look like relics from a prior era, yet this is an active harvest. The groves evoke other dichotomies such as regeneration and decay, fruition and demise, the seductive and the forbidden.

The border stretches fifty miles to the south; the tensions visible in this place point to a wider contextual net. Who dares to climb these ladders, and who inhabits the trailers and the campsites half-hidden below? The net stretches further: The date palm originated in the area once known as Mesopotamia, now Iraq. It is the Muslim sacred tree, called “tree of life.“

Tenuous apparitions, the oases lining this highway are sustained solely by the controlled flooding of a desiccated landscape. This grafted version of paradise is, evidently, in peril.