Born in Kansas City, MO; and based in Los Angeles, CA

Zoe Alameda makes assemblages with a punk-DIY ethos that collapse real life and virtual reality. Dense, raw, and expressive, her wall works derive from and repel against not only the cyber world, but also the painting medium.

Trained as a painter, Alameda started her practice creating canvases based on imagery sourced from the internet. Yet Alameda found that flat pictorial representation was too aligned with the online content that she was portraying. Working to introduce tactility, dimension, and tangibility to both the digital and painting realms, the artist began incorporating found materials into her acrylic depictions of crushed cars, crumbling houses, fragmented bodies, and iPhone graphics. She also collages photographs of tattoos, selfies on social media, anime cartoons, and bumper stickers together with items from her personal surroundings. The artist often frames these compositions with discarded pieces of metal or wood. Alameda rescues such disposable materials from contemporary life, using them to intersect the visuals on her surfaces—evoking a hunger for physical intimacy and authenticity in the midst of digital alienation and excess.