Alison Brady is an NYC-based photographer and self-proclaimed ‘absurdist.’ Her work represents facets of the female experience, in a vivid, surrealist mode: “What I try to do is bring you in with beautiful colors and textures and then leave you feeling like something is wrong here, something is not quite right.” A deep sense of interiority and a palpable inward struggle penetrate Brady’s pictures, in which feminine figures are often shown faceless or face-down, in suffocating stances. She describes her brother’s diagnosis with schizophrenia as a moment where she began to question her own interpretation of reality, “I started developing this fear, like, what if one day the reality I knew just changed?” Brady cites Freud’s Beyond The Pleasure Principle as an influence on her work, in its account of neuroses and the way which we compulsively seek to repeat painful experiences. “I explore issues related to madness and alienation as they exist in contemporary culture, concentrating on expressions of neurosis, on feelings of anxiety, displacement, and loss of identity. These emotions are depicted in terms of visual conflict through my imagery, and manifested in terms of grotesque exaggeration.”
