Allyson Glenn

Lives and works in Saskatoon, SK, Canada

Artist statement

Allyson Glenn is a visual artist based in Saskatoon, Canada working in painting, drawing, photo-collage, and animation. She is fascinated by the relationship between the fictional worlds that we create and the real ones we inhabit. Working across mediums, she looks to interrupt and de-contextualize the visual language of the original photographic reference by collaging, amalgamating and layering images. Scenes she constructs are allusive and activate the mind’s capacity to reconsider the familiar and alter our unexamined expectations of visual language, spatial relations, and time. Artwork in Collection: My extended consideration of the influence of stories, Greek mythology on intellectual, psychic, and symbolic life, has led to two series of paintings entitled Passages (2019) and Date with Hermes (2025). The series includes three groupings and one animation. The first diptych titled Date with Hermes was inspired by a recurring dream about a portal to my death in the antiquities wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hermes, considered the messenger and guide between the living and dead, embodies the liminal place between dreamwork and consciousness, life and death, past and present, myth and reality. This painting explores this threshold, where boundaries dissolve. Entanglement (polyptych) re-tells the Greek myth of Dionysus and Ariadne, with the middle piece depicting the moment that Ariadne is deified and she transcends her human form. Icarus and the Fates (pentaptych)...

Artwork