Alena Mehić (b. 1995, Zavidovići, Bosnia & Herzegovina; lives in Nashville, TN) examines utopia, nation-building, and the archive within the expanded field of painting. She relies on elements of print media, cinema, design history, surrealism, and folklore to evoke parallel universes, investigating the disconnect between past projected futures and reality through altered and imagined space. Her interest in post-communist perception and the politics of memory lends itself to ambiguous images and hypnotic, dreamlike compositions that oscillate between flatness and true representation, further emphasizing a silent but steady descent into entropy.
Mehić received her MFA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2021 and her BFA from Middle Tennessee State University in 2017. Select exhibitions include STATE Gallery at The Forge, Nashville, TN (2024); Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh, NC (2023); and Zeitgeist, Nashville, TN (2022). She is a past artist in residence at The Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY (2023); Loghaven, Knoxville, TN (2023); and The Forge, Nashville, TN (2023-2024). She was a recipient of the 2021-2022 Master of Fine Art Fellowship in Painting & Sculpture from the Dedalus Foundation in New York and was featured in the 2022 MFA Annual Issue of New American Paintings.