Sophia Allison
Germination Station
4/26 to 5/30
Reception: Saturday, 4/26, 6 to 9p
I make beauty from crap. My work is born out of a world of 9-5 exhaustion, too many salty snack foods and rock and roll songs. The studio is a laboratory where I am not so much the scientist but more the lab rat. I am an empty vessel waiting silent commands. My hands and brain are wired to the same invisible unit receiving secret electrical impulses that drive me to compulsively cut, tear, shred, sew and make. My training as a painter kicks in and I instinctively place pieces of color, forms, shapes, value and lines into some sort of aesthetic order. I impose a small amount of control over the work but only so much as to make a barely legible map, a kind of visual sense of the elements; otherwise, the materials dictate to me what they will eventually become. I borrow and steal textures and forms found in nature but don't replicate so much as allude to or quote from them. I coax ordinary materials to transcend into new forms that are a surprise even to me.