Allison Hornak is a multidisciplinary artist whose work layers multispecies and material concerns in an interdisciplinary practice existing among sculpture, performance, and writing. They grew up along a lake called Zoar. Their BFA is from Montserrat College of Art, during which they used a scholarship to backpack through New Zealand. They have been a Goetemann artist resident, a CWOS commissioned artist, a Nomad9 participant and a curator for small group exhibitions. In 2020, they performed at the Venice International Performance Art Week. They live and work in the settlement of New Haven, where they maintain an art studio with four budgerigars named Toby, Mantis, Louie, and Caesar. There too, they participate in their local arts community at the Erector Square Studios and through various studio critique groups. In 2023, they will complete their MFA through the low residency program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
coping, 2022, Chicken wire, chocolate candy, saliva, all the artist paint in my studio, budgerigar feather, chain, 12 x 18 x 7 In.
A meeting point.
My current work is the completion of a multi-year sculptural exploration of identity. This scrutiny has involved pulling from methodologies of post-minimalist, feminist, and cottagecore aesthetics. It seeks to combine them with material languages I have learned from various critters co-occupying my art studio: mostly a flock of four, uncaged parakeets and an occasional mouse. The overarching aim was to create a series of messy sculptures reconsidering not only the medium, but also my connections to the private and interpersonal structures of (middle class) White Womanhood. Critter-inspired visual devices have helped me navigate these reconsiderations both materially and conceptually. While working through this series early on, two such devices commonly repeated: chewing and caging. So, a direct way to frame what has motivated these works (there are fourteen) is: in each piece I seek to mash some kind of caging with some kind of chewing, and in so doing, handle something/substances of myself.