Urban Art

Rebecca Alston's preoccupation with color, whether starkly vivid or subversively pretty, can be clearly seen in her Urban Art series, created between 1995 and 2004. The drawings in Urban Art have their roots in the theoretical processes of urban development. Alston concentrates on the natural and man-made forces that affect individual environments.

"The lines may look random", Alston says, "but they create very definite forms and spaces."

She has invested her artworks with the energy of three distinct, yet interdependent, realms of facture: what is built above ground, what is mapped on the ground, and what constitutes and modifies the structure of the ground itself. The axis of experimental reality in her artwork is the surface of the earth, though compromised by a thoroughgoing overlay of urban intervention.

The Urban Art canvases show lucid, austere, rectilinear compositions of a neoplastic formal practice. The resulting suppression of formal extravagance allows Alston's colors greater play, as it gives them much more autonomy.

(Peter Frank)