Allyson Vieira will present “A Pot to Piss In,” an installation of new sculptures at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery from February 18 through March 26, 2017. The show will run in conjunction with Vieira’s solo exhibition at Company Gallery, February 28 through April 2.
It’s darker here now. A black volume of construction netting fills the void of the gallery space. Looming, it pushes you under it. You have to stoop and look down.
Vessels sit on the gallery floor. Humanity’s simplest tools, vessels are ubiquitous—culturally, temporally—and hold an essential, permanent place throughout the unspooling timeline of human existence. Made from melted plastic shopping bags, these imperfect vessels “don’t hold water.” The non-functional forms straddle times: a bleak, half-digested future’s past. Familiar logos and patterns stretch, melt, and degrade, becoming colorful swathes of design and decoration. There is a shoddy permanence to these inescapable bags; despite their “throwaway” intention, they become a broken down, impoverished, raw material of the future.
Allyson Vieira lives and works in New York. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including the museum solo The Plural Present (Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland and Swiss Institute, New York); as a finalist in Future Generation Art Prize (PinchukArtCentre, Kiev, UA);Massage the History: Historical testimonies and artistic practice (iset Contemporary Greek Art Institute); and Build On, Build Against, with Stephen Ellis (Non Objectif Sud, Tulette, France). Domestic exhibits include Frieze Projects; the Public Art Fund; The Highline; the Sculpture Center, NY; the Philbrook Museum of Art Tulsa, OK; and Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum. Recent gallery solo shows include Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, BR; The Breeder, Athens, GR; Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto, CA; Laurel Gitlen, New York; and Monica de Cardenas, Milan, IT. In 2018, Vieira will publish “On the Rock: The Acropolis Interviews” with Soberscove Press, Chicago, IL. Vieira received a BFA in studio art from The Cooper Union and an MFA in sculpture from Bard College.
