Allison Wiese
Allison Wiese is a Brooklyn-bred and Houston-based interdisciplinary artist. Her sculptures, sound installations and architectural interventions celebrate improvisational authority, altering spaces through acts of labeling, christening or commemoration. The installation created for Women & Their Work, Come To Find Out, featured stacks of hay displayed to create an arena within the gallery – a suitable place, one imagines, to contemplate the tension between our pastoral history and our urban present.
Wiese stated ” I’ve always been interested in podiums, stages and pulpits. I’m particularly fascinated with the impromptu platform of the soapbox, and the minimal but important conditions necessary to render it a place of authority. My work celebrates this improvisational authority – the space of the sub-suburban yard fort and the do-it-yourself ‘zine or broadside. A lot of my work has a performative quality – I alter spaces through acts of labeling, christening or commemoration.”
Wiese’s projects are predominantly realized as sculpture and installation; she works across a broad range of media in what has become more-or-less a poststudio practice. The materials and subjects she choose are the result of an ornery insistence on using stuff from everyday experience, (like hay bales) minimally transformed, as relevant art material, dragging it into the space of the art institution to point to a different kind of (infinitely less sterile) space. Wiese stated, ” I have an ambivalent relationship to institutional art space, thriving on the friction it provides at the same time that I often situate my work near the edges, or outside of, traditional display space.”
