Emily Promise Allison

[En anglais]

Wilted carrots dangling from an armature built around the artist. Silver feet and hands dancing on the grass among flowers. The artist’s long blonde tresses hiding her face reflected in a mirror. At the 4th Street Lilac Festival (Calgary) Emily Promise Allison swirled on a grassy knoll allowing the audience to join her in her reveries. Dream Sequence, commissioned by Untitled Art Society, was a durational performance that intertwined dreams and reality in a magical dilemma: how to bring our nighttime dreams into our daytime lives lit by the sun.

Over the course of four hours, Promise Allison brought together a collection of disparate and banal objects: vases, water, balloons, flowers, carrots, bananas, candles, tomatillos, mirrors, gridded structures, and silver spray paint, in a series of strange and playful scenarios. A banana is locked in a cage-like structure, much to the chagrin of the men in the audience. The artist’s silver painted hands submerged in arm-length vases full of water, she studying them carefully as bubbles rose and fell. Small translucent balls dropped onto a mirror, rolled towards the hands of the audience. Small children reached out towards her and became equal participants, as if crossing a veil into the liminal space she created.