Allison Leigh Holt: The Glass System

April 6 – May 25, 2016

This body of work combines projected light, video and sculptures that have origins in my research as a Fulbright Fellow in Indonesia. There, I was concerned with Javanese cosmology, tools for navigating the relationship between humans and nature as living, interacting systems of consciousness, and the idea that we interact with everything in our world, including much that our bodies are not designed to perceive. The works in this exhibition specifically focus on consciousness as an overlooked territory that one attempts to comprehend through technologies, optics and visual models. Exploring traditional and scientific ways of experiencing time and reality, they are an effort to express the contemporary relevance and equivalent value of both.

Allison Leigh Holt (b. 1972) is a cross-disciplinary artist living and working in Oakland, CA. Using hybrids of sculpture, video, installation, and performance she pursues a dialogue between divergent ways of experiencing, comprehending, and describing reality. Holt has received numerous awards from institutions including the U.S. Department of State (Fulbright Fellowship, Indonesia), Djerassi Artist Residency Program, the San Francisco Arts Commission, the David Bermant Foundation, Cemeti Art House (Indonesia), the Experimental Television Center, Kala Art Institute, and the North Dakota Museum of Art. Currently, she is a finalist for a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. At the 47th UND Writers Conference in 2016, she will be in conversation with theoretical physicist Brian Greene.

Allison Leigh Holt, The Glass System #2, 2015.

Plexiglass, Video, Electronics, Neodymium Magnets, Steel, 7 x 7 x 4 Inches. 

Installation Images