Allison Spence

Allison Spence is a Florida artist working with painting, sculpture, collage, and writing. Using various mediums she creates objects about states of hybridity within nature and culture. Her research frequently branches into different fields, such as biology, horror, and botany, and she focuses on creating work that exists in-between distinctions of media. Her most recent project is a critical exploration of the history of monstrosity.

“To approach something with taxonomic efficiency, while perhaps reassuring or beautiful, can also be an act of violence. I call this “pinning the butterfly;” one keeps meaning static and renders the possibility of becoming something else motionless. My work focuses on how we categorize and delimit the bodies around us, whether that body is corporeal, verbal, or formal. Because of this, I’m particularly interested in hybridity and its ontological precedent, monstrosity. A consistent theme in my work has been the classification of monstrosity and how the monster exists to preserve the myth of the base-line human.”

Follow the artist along: www.allison-spence.com

Allison is featured on the Winter 2024 edition of Art Seen, Issue 14.