ALLISON
ARKUSH
As an interdisciplinary and multimedia artist Allison’s practice engages a wide and fluctuating range of materials, modalities, and research. She primarily works within the domains of sculpture and installation, which have increasingly come to include her poetry, as well as audio and video components. Allison’s ever-emergent and evolving personal lexicon of symbols and metaphorical motifs connects and deepens the narratives within her work. These individual symbols are germunits, each representing a single germinated concept/object that has proliferated and taken on new associations and meanings, becoming deeply rooted in and vining through her practice.
Her sculptures and installations can function similarly to her poems, but the arrangements are of physical objects and materials rather than language. The germunits act as nouns, materials are the adjectival modifiers, and the assembled sculptures become sentences within the poem. Her larger, more conglomerative works containing multiple germunits, materials, and found objects are object ecosystems. Allison’s most extensively realized works tend to manifest as multi-sensorial installations containing multiple object ecosystems alongside video/audio and other components— thus forming a network or constellation of tableaus within(and between) spaces.
BIO
Allison Arkush was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. In 2010 she moved across the country to attend New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. While at NYU she studied studio art, psychology, and the intersection of these two disciplines; she graduated magna cum laude. In the following years Allison taught ceramics classes, worked as a studio technician and later as studio manager, among many odd jobs. In 2019 Allison relocated to Lincoln to begin her graduate studies that Fall. Allison was a third-year Fine Art graduate student at University of Nebraska-Lincoln when she first wrote this bio in 2022. After receiving her Masters Degree, she continued to teach sculpture-related classes at UNL, until returning to Los Angeles in 2023.
Her sculptures and installations can function similarly to her poems, but the arrangements are of physical objects and materials rather than language. The germunits act as nouns, materials are the adjectival modifiers, and the assembled sculptures become sentences within the poem. Her larger, more conglomerative works containing multiple germunits, materials, and found objects are object ecosystems. Allison’s most extensively realized works tend to manifest as multi-sensorial installations containing multiple object ecosystems alongside video/audio and other components— thus forming a network or constellation of tableaus within(and between) spaces.
BIO
Allison Arkush was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. In 2010 she moved across the country to attend New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. While at NYU she studied studio art, psychology, and the intersection of these two disciplines; she graduated magna cum laude. In the following years Allison taught ceramics classes, worked as a studio technician and later as studio manager, among many odd jobs. In 2019 Allison relocated to Lincoln to begin her graduate studies that Fall. Allison was a third-year Fine Art graduate student at University of Nebraska-Lincoln when she first wrote this bio in 2022. After receiving her Masters Degree, she continued to teach sculpture-related classes at UNL, until returning to Los Angeles in 2023.