My Art
I am a narrative photographer at heart. Much of my work embodies the tenets of staged photography, where objects and figures are arranged to create a fictionalized tableau. Through these staged compositions, I aim to tell astory with each photograph. Psychoanalytic theory grounds my work across several projects. In my practice, I often excavate and illuminate the narratives of dreams, memories, forgotten family history, colonialism, and violence through feminist and Freudian lenses. Fittingly, the photographic process echoes psychoanalysis, a practice that reveals suppressed thoughts and neurosis. Photography is an an act of illumination, a process that documents, proves, and fixes the unseen, the intangible, and the fleeting. Inspired by Surrealist art and paintings from the Romantic period, I often photograph in a large format and digitally edit, collage, and combine disparate imagery to create the resulting narrative photograph.
Biography
Alison Erazmus (b. 1983) is a fine art photographer, visual artist, and curator originally from the flat agricultural landscape of northern Illinois. She is currently based in Saint Louis, Missouri. She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree with an emphasis in photography from Southern Illinois University Carbondale in 2008. Since then she has exhibited her work at galleries and museums across the country, including at the South Bend Museum of Art, The Silverspace Gallery in Asheville, North Carolina, the Cedarhurst Center for the Arts, the Evansville Museum, the New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art, the Darkroom Gallery, and the Arts Council of Southeast Missouri. Her work has received honorable mentions and has been included in several juried group exhibitions, including recently the “Of Memory, Myth, and Bone” annual juried exhibition in North Dakota.
In addition to her photographic work, she also looks to exhibit her films, installation work, handmade books, drawings, and handmade lamps. She welcomes clients for portrait photography (especially family and pet portraits), architecture photography, interior design photography, and branding photography.
