It Won’t Be Easy

MFA Thesis Show May 2022

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, 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. Though this assertion offers some clarity, it belies the complexity of Allison’s conglomerative sculptures. Instead, the works containing multiple germunits, materials, and found objects are object ecosystems. Allison’s thesis exhibition will contain multiple object ecosystem, forming a network or constellation of tableaus within the gallery.

︎ Thesis Abstract
︎ Video & Sound
︎ UNL Digital Commons