'Alliance' is a print made by placing two different plates next to one other on the same sheet of paper. The upper image is a line drawing of a sailing ship and the lower image shows a star field, a regular theme in Celmins’s work. The picture of the boat is most likely taken from an engineer’s drawing. Utilising aquatint, mezzotint and dry-point, 'Alliance' is one of a number of prints that Celmins made at Gemini, GEL in Los Angeles during the mid-1980s in which she explored the juxtaposition of two or more differing images. She explained: "I started putting one image next to another. Sort of just shoving them together ... It meant that when you were close to the work each eye would see a different image, or you would have to move your attention from one to the other." 'Alliance' was considered to be one of the highlights of the major exhibition of Celmins’s prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 2002.