Laylah Ali: Meaning

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Art21 first featured artist Laylah Ali in 2005
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Watch the original & uncut 13 minute film online! (via Hulu)

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Laylah Ali is featured in the Art21 episode "Power" along with fellow artists Ida Applebroog, Cai Guo-Qiang, and Krzysztof Wodiczko. The Season 3 DVD features 4 episodes, 18 artists, and is available from PBS and Amazon.

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Channels: American ArtContemporary ArtDrawingPainting
Artists: Laylah Ali
Themes: Becoming / Being an ArtistMaterials and Process

Exclusive Episode #074: While painting in her Williamstown, Massachusetts studio, artist Laylah Ali discusses the imperative she feels to make things and the nuanced relationship of political and personal events to the work.

Laylah Ali creates gouache-on-paper paintings that take her many months to complete. Ali meticulously plots out in advance every aspect of her work, from subject matter to choice of color, achieving a high level of emotional tension in her paintings as a result of juxtaposing brightly colored scenes with dark, often violent subject matter.

Learn more about Laylah Ali: http://www.art21.org/artists/laylah-ali

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Joel Shapiro. Sound: Tom Bergin. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Artwork Courtesy: Laylah Ali.

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00:00:16 You make things on some level because you have to make things, so there is a kind of electrical energy in you that means that you have to do this thing.

00:00:28 And I think that a lot of my creative output has to do with that. I have to have a place to put whatever electrical loose ends, chemical loose ends that I have

00:00:39 or so you know somebody will get hurt right. So, no one gets hurt, I come in here and do what I have to do.

00:00:49 I had a painting in here recently that it was something about the US elections and the you know all of the hype and the listening to the radio over and over again about the elections

00:00:59 and the fear I had and the build up. It made its way into the work and it’s not necessarily I sat down and thought I am going to make a painting about the election.

00:01:12 It just kind of happened that some of the energy of that and not necessarily good energy got into the work.

00:01:21 I am not good with saying, well this is what the work is about right, because it shifts like I am working on this right now

00:01:31 and I couldn’t honestly tell you what this painting is about. It would almost take for me to finish it, look at it, live with it, and then I could may be start telling you about it,

00:01:44 but as I am working on it, it’s still too close. I know just because I have had time to sort of look at my process for a while.

00:01:56 I know that there are things in here that are very much connected to me and to the time I am living in, but I just can’t say, well this is about the IRA

00:02:07 and this is about South Africa. And oh, that wound there, that’s what happened to me when I was twelve that might all be true, but I can’t,

00:02:17 it’s not like that that’s not how I lay down the images. This is almost as if that information comes in, it goes through me and it comes out in my hands in a way that

00:02:29 I don’t mean to make this mysterious or like I am being guided by some external force, but there is something that happens that I am not entirely in control of.