by Keith Evans
Zoe Alameda was born in the year 2000, meaning she is exactly young enough to have missed the 1990s, and that, depending on how you look at it, either complicates or explains her fascination with one of that decade’s signature aesthetics. Specifically her multimedia collages of ambiguous and patterned images (a finger here, a fence-shadow there, all heavy on the handedness and evidence of painstaking resin-and-gel cut-and-paste) evoke the dreamy scratch-and-blur photo-derived work from the years of Grunge and Clinton. Alameda’s work recalls previous efforts by Mike and Doug Starn, Barbara Ess, Christian Boltanski and Sandman covers by avant-garde comic artist Dave McKean—all of whom used the substance and texture of photographic prints to open a portal to the dreamy, post-Symbolist world first plumbed decades earlier in service of Joseph Cornell’s attic-plundering nostalgia. Everything is swirling, fragmentary, fuzzily unknowable, seen through cracked and crooked lenses. Nearly all of this work was described as accessing “a space of memory.”
In Alameda’s case, the doubled remove of the hazy memory reconstructed hazily is redoubled yet again because in 2026 we are forced by all her stapling and grit to notice the perversity of even having physical photographic prints, much less cherishing their imperfections. The air of fevered, sketchbookish preservation seems all the eerier in a world where Googling an image of anything is easy and a damaged print can always be replaced. These shoes, these fragments of poster, these unknown globules—their juxtaposition cannot help but have a strangely ersatz and deliberate air of reconstruction about them once you notice the show’s opening date, like a rotting house built from scratch to serve as a set for a brand-new horror film.
This is perhaps and unfortunately the most original thing about them: how unnatural it seems for an artist born into a world without darkrooms to have landed here. It is difficult to begrudge Alameda this exploration, though—this is a space of mysteries, and nothing is more mysterious than the fact that life, in all its detail, was lived all the way through long before you were born.
Image: Courtesy of Cheremoya Gallery