Allison Baker
Assistant Professor
Hamline University
Description of Work:
Allison Baker earned her MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design, a BFA in Sculpture and BA in Gender Studies from Indiana University.
Allison’s recent body of work utilizes sculpture, video, new media, and medical narrative of “environmental illness” to examine the competing scientific paradigms that currently, but contradictorily, define and govern the “health” and “normalcy” of our post-digital bodies and homes. Sculptural feminist praxis (specifically, the abject) reveals what our previously considered “safe” and “sterile” domestic spaces, objects, and bodies really are: Semi-monstrous organic communities, of which “we” are only one tiny, post-human part.
Allison is currently an Assistant Professor at Hamline University where in conjunction with studio art she teaches courses on medical rhetoric and the morphology of madness where students trace Knowledge/Power in medicine and society via self published zines and artist books. Allison has exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Flux Factory, and Knockdown Center in New York, and a recent solo exhibition at the CICA Museum in South Korea. She has held a number of national and international residencies, including Franconia Sculpture Park (where her work is currently exhibited).
Her personal visual arts research investigates hegemonic femininity as a site of transgression and resistance. A thematic subtext of the work revolves around cleaning, caregiving, and labor. Allison’s work tackles class and gendered poverty from a position of lived experience, not with a laser focused clarity or awareness of her intentions and material choices but from within what Bourdieu would call a subordinated position as “the working-class ‘aesthetic’ is a dominated aesthetic,” because she is trailer trash that likes shiny things and trashy things and nacho cheese.
Socials:
https://www.instagram.com/ajbakersculpture/
https://www.instagram.com/institute.aesthetic.advocacy/