Tracie Noles-Ross
- After the Apocalypse: Counterspell
- After the Apocalypse: Forever Ghost
- After the Apocalypse: Crow Haptics
- After the Apocalypse: Lacuna
- After the Apocalypse: Bird's Nest
- After the Apocalypse: The Fisher's Basket
- After the Apocalypse: Deer Grandmother Dear
- After the Apocalypse: On the Mend
- After the Apocalypse: The Widow's Purse
- After the Apocalypse: Toast and the Frankenbrush
Tracie Noles-Ross is a multidisciplinary storyteller living and working in Birmingham, Alabama. She holds a B.A. from the University of Alabama in Birmingham with a concentration in Visual Arts and Creative Writing. Noles-Ross was the recipient of the 2023-2024 Alabama State Council on the Arts Individual Artists Fellowship.
Strongly committed to understanding the place she is from, Noles-Ross explores aspects of the biologically diverse Alabama landscape, concepts of family and southern culture, deconstructing them for the purpose of improvement and growth while concurrently protecting, preserving, and celebrating this place she calls home.
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In my After the Apocalypse: My Grandmother was a Landscape series, discarded and forgotten objects are reconfigured, braiding themes of memory, place, and identity; encouraging a shift in perspective. I am fascinated by the way objects can connect people to memories, transporting the viewer to other places and times. My process disguises the original form and purpose of objects in an attempt to bring forward new narratives or invoke emotional responses. When the objects are taken out of context and combined with other objects, I find the juxtaposed and intertwined pieces then move beyond familiar descriptions and stories about the individual parts and through interpolation and the imposition of personal emotions become something new, free of history and memory and full of suggestion and potential. Recontextualization offers up a narrative of renewal. I often use the language of conjuration when I make these peculiar fetishes. They feel like counter spells as I tried to make something meaningful or beautiful out of the shards of a broken and fragmented pasts. This work for me is about how we experience objects and hold memories but also about the lifting of burdens and the promise of something new during challenging times.