The colorful explosion of modern neon colors and primitive forms in Neon Primitivism is a natural extension of both Ali’s primitivist ideology and her commitment to rock n roll. This new series celebrates the canvas and painting as a form with the power to transfer primitivism, sensuality and emotion to a space in a modern return to Ab Ex style, mixing the ultra mattes of Mexican folk art with earthy clays, and vibrant charcoals and oils, and pointing to forms that enlight the viewer towards the multiple directions of cave paintings, the new york school, ceremonial body paints, line work, weathered artifacts, Charles Olsen’s 'Archaic Post Modern' and pop art.
Ali’s work across multiple mediums has always been founded conceptually in both her nature and survival skills studies as well as her ‘bringing the party and the fun’. It is here that Ali’s conceptual work led naturally to the crossover that would lead her to explore paintings based on sensuality and dimension - the feeling, the experience and the space they create. It was here that she derived the process of working with clays, dried plant materials, botanical dyes, and paints made of finely crushed rare minerals and gems, to explore glowing mattes and chalky earthy textures. This follows in the tradition of her prior sculptural work (almost an artistic take on experimental archeology) which traces primitive technologies, and works with the experiential and the sensual - i.e. hand building mahogany and glass rain catchments, working with fire as a sculptural element, exploring artifact creation using primitive tools and techniques as a means to explore primitivism, lighting up a boulder strewn desert for invitees to walk through, and even building a surfboard from Tule reeds.
Her directness of emotion communicated through primal, rugged gestures, juxtaposed with an integration of ancient philosophies explores the thin line between symbolic totems, anthropomorphic figuration, gestural abstraction and a modern pop sensibility. Her confident and rule shattering sensibility pulls on us to be 21st century rebels once again and to seek wildness, experience, humanity, and mythos.
