Emily Promise Allison

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.