Alena Mehić
Work
Information & Contact
alenamehic@gmail.com
CV
Alena Mehić (b. 1995, Zavidovići, Bosnia & Herzegovina; lives in Tallahassee, FL) examines places of transition and uncertainty, invoking the utopian design ambitions of the socialist modern movement to stage tensions between instability, hope, belonging, and hesitation. The geographical and ideological position of Yugoslavia, suspended between the Eastern and Western blocs during the Cold War, informs a visual language in which ornamental, old-fashioned décor collides with sleek modernist form: a pairing that serves as a near-perfect emblem of the former state. Key figures, objects, and architectural features drawn from archival media carry the functional idealism of a bygone era into compositions that layer flat and representational techniques, weaving narratives that move between fact and fiction, the authentic and the abstract. Dated yet optimistic, these aesthetic markers act as ideological anchors within constructed portals, pressing on the ambiguity of time and the precarious, impressionable nature of both private and national memory.
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.