ALESSANDRA ABBALLE

Alessandra Abballe is an artist, writer, researcher, and educator currently living, working, and making on Treaty 13 Territory (Toronto).

Rooted in photography and image-based practices, Alessandra’s work extends to an engagement with personal and public archives, video, needlework, textiles, and ceramics. Most recently, they have been interested in experimenting with obfuscating and illegible visual tactics in their work as both aesthetic praxis and a generative means of refusal. They are keen on mining sticky or muddy feelings and seeing what can be done with them.

Alessandra’s work has exhibited nationally, including in Capture Photography Festival and CONTACT Photography Festival. They hold a BFA in Photography Studies from Toronto Metropolitan University's School of Image Arts (2018) and an MFA in Visual Arts from York University (2025) where their research was supported by a Joseph Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship (SSHRC).

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PROCESS & RESEARCH

Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts, March 2026.

Studio fragments from my time as an Artist in Residence with Undisciplined.

Installation view. Anthology (group show), Top Top Projects, 2025. Left: Wang Zi. Right: Jules D. Mills.

Exhibition pamphlets created by Jasmine Yangqingqing Yu.

Fragmented plaster hand on my studio floor, 2023.

Capture Photography Festival, 2023.

Kwantlen Polytechnic University, 2023.

Student work from an alternative photographic processes class where students experimented with making cyanotypes, anthotypes, and chlorophyll printing.

WORK

Block out the sun, Chromogenic print, 30”x30”, 2026.

“He faces about and, standing between the awnings, held out his right arm at arm’s length toward the sun. Wanted to try that often. Yes; completely. The tip of his little finger blotted out the sun’s disc. Must be the focus where the rays cross.”

- Ulysses, James Joyce

Sticky feelings (for Ahmed), Unglazed stoneware letters on studio desk, 2024.

“Sticky feelings, like velcro”, 2025.

This paper is written to accompany my MFA thesis exhibition, An object thick with presence (the presence of an absence), which took place April 14 - 17, 2025 at Special Projects Gallery (York University). The work included in this exhibition is informed by my sticky experiences with family photographs—experiences that situate me as what writer and scholar Sara Ahmed calls an “affect-alien,” a feminist killjoy, and unhappy queer. The exhibition consists of reworked images gleaned from my family albums, ceramic objects, and various photo-installation strategies in an effort to work on, with, and against the structure of the family album. The aim of this paper, “Sticky feelings, like velcro,” is to make sense of and contextualize my inclinations in making through an explanation of and grounding in queer and intersectional feminist theory and practices, alongside personal auto theoretical anecdotes. How do images from my personal archives—ones that I hold so much affection for, but do not feel myself reflected in—register? How can I work in tandem with these images to claim space and agency? My thesis exhibition and this accompanying support paper use these questions as a springboard to look up and back, as well as forward and onward.

Installation view. An object thick with presence (the presence of an absence), MFA thesis exhibition, Special Projects Gallery, 2025.

To point to, Concrete floor, family photo, greenware, 25”x25”, 2024.

To hold, Concrete floor, family photo, greenware, 25”x25”, 2024.

In the distance, to become oblique, to slip a little, Three inkjet prints on fabric, 40”x57” each, 2024.

“If the object slips away, if its face becomes inverted, it looks odd, strange, out of place, what will we do? If we feel oblique, where will we find support?”

- Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Sara Ahmed

Untitled needlepoint #1, 4”x6”, Cotton thread on aida cloth, 2022.

Untitled needlepoint #2, 4”x6”, Cotton thread on aida cloth, 2022.

Untitled needlepoint #3, 4”x6”, Cotton thread on aida cloth, 2023.

Untitled needlepoint #4, 4”x6”, Cotton thread on aida cloth, 2023.

Video Stills. A game, an allegory, a Sears portrait, 5:11, Single channel video, 2021.

A game, an allegory, a Sears portrait is a video work that explores notions of pose and gender performance in family photographs and vernacular images.

Video Stills. Myself and My Heroes (2020), 12:14, Single-channel video, 2020.

Myself and My Heroes (2020) is a video work made for the online iteration of She Unfolds, an exhibition by Alessandra Abballe and Sara Knelman exhibited at Artspace Gallery. Referencing David Hockney’s 1961 work of the same name, the video explores images, video clips, books and articles that have informed thinking on heroism and its relationship to gender throughout history. During a moment in time when image archives and libraries were physically inaccessible, this video uses screen recording in order to reveal connections made between different source material and highlight the stories of women that often exist in the structural margins of “the hero’s journey”.

She Unfolds, Artspace Gallery, March 2020.

A two-person exhibition by Alessandra Abballe and Sara Knelman shown at Artspace Gallery in March 2020.

She Unfolds: On Women Writers and Readers, Clea Christakos-Gee In Conversation with Alessandra Abballe and Sara Knelman.