bio: allison hornak (they/them)
I am a transdisciplinary artist working with multispecies and material concerns. My practice exists among sculpture, performance, and writing. I grew up on stolen Paugussett, Pequonnock, Schaghticoke, and Wappinger land. I have gone through the art university system. I live and work in the settlement of New Haven, where I maintain an art studio and engage in arts communities through studio critique groups, the Erector Square Studios network, and other arts organizing efforts. Here too, I participated in the wall-to-wall unionization of Common High School Ground/The New Haven Ecology Project, where I was an educator for five years.
For this time we are in, to be acting with an awareness before/within brutality, one must address power structures. I believe in struggling to understand one’s location in relation to subjugating power, and work, in the capacity/resources one has, to dissent. Ultimately, I seek to make the journey of abolishing, as the artist Tourmaline said, “the cop inside your head and in your heart” continually attractive for myself, as well as others. In my practice, my primary passion of human-nonhuman entanglement is a vehicle for unpacking the intersections of my own histories, identities and corporeal significations. I learn about myself, and undo myself, through engagement with a strange multispecies ecosystem inside my art studio–predominantly, a flock of four uncaged budgerigars named Toby, Mantis, Louie and Caesar. Post-anthropocentric concerns are the means by which I attempt to make addressing white supremacy culture an embodied experience.