Signal and Sensibility

Alan Fulle

Curated by David Francis, PhD

For over 40 years, Northwest artist Alan Fulle has experimented with a wide variety of materials and media, often exploring the boundary between painting and sculpture, and between sculpture and video. After many years of working with cast resin, he developed serious health complications and was diagnosed with cancer of the Thymus organ and Myesthenia Gravis, an autoimmune disease in which nerve signals to muscles are interrupted. Forced to reexamine his practice and distill everything he had learned into what he feared might be a final attempt to unify the diversity of his practice, Fulle focused on a series of giant 7' x 6' canvases that he worked on outdoors to avoid the concentration of fumes released by various urethane washes. Faced with mortality, the artist's culmination of a lifelong practice is embodied in Signal and Sensibility. Fulle describes the series as "alternat(ing) between mark-making and vast washes or layers of color that for me began to articulate a physical sensation of space."