Aliene de Souza Howell
"The Hiræth"
Jan. 27 - March 4, 2022
About the artist:
Aliene de Souza Howell is a New-York-City-based artist who was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. She is the daughter of a Brazilian physical education specialist and a psychologist of Welsh descent originally from Long Island, New York. Growing up in this bi-cultural, analytic environment imbued Howell with a keen sense of observation, curiosity and scrutiny of human behavior. In her work, animal and object hybrids strip the specificity of human features to bring the focus to gesture and movement, animals and inanimate objects functioning as metaphor for human interactions with each other, the objects we use, and the natural world.
The graphic and monochromatic nature of the linocut lend her surrealistic images an
austere, documentary character out of time and place. The slow, deliberate process
of carving a linocut and the image that develops results in an intense form of physical
excavation. The remaining marks document a somewhat harsh yet whimsical physical process
that mirrors the dual nature of the images.
Howell received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Guilford College and her Master of Fine Arts from the New York Academy of Art. She worked as muralist and educator with the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, which significantly impacted her work. In her spare time, Howell is a voracious reader of fiction, film enthusiast and outdoorswoman, having once watched a storm pass below her while hiking the German Alps with her best friend. She has completed a post-graduate fellowship, was critiqued by Steve Martin, and has exhibited in New York City and internationally. She completed residencies in Germany and Ireland. Howell’s work is in many esteemed collections, including Naomi Watts and Leiv Schreiber, Francie Bishop Good and Howard Tullman.