alliewist [at] gmail [dot] com
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I am an artist-scholar and writer, currently working on an Interdisciplinary Arts PhD at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute, with a focus on the senses, toxicity, the Anthropocene, and environmental archives.
My practice examines the breakdown of the nature/culture binary through digestion, food, and the chemical senses. Working across photography, video, installation, and sensory practice, my work often touches on themes of taste and smell—historically devalued senses entangled with colonial hierarchies and gendered labor—as epistemological tools to understand ecological change at scales that exceed human subjectivity.
I cultivate encounters with material permeability: kaolin clay ingested from an open-pit mine, perfumes distilled from monocropping, installations where plastic pollution becomes the toxic sublime. These works figure the body as accelerated strata, accumulating markers of anthropogenic impacts in our bloodstreams, at the same time that human waste sediments into future geology. Metabolic time becomes protocol—a way to sense the body as an indeterminate, ambiguous, material proxy. Drawing on Fluxus, social practice, and art-as-research methodologies, often in collaboration with climate scientists and geologists, I insist that knowledge production happens through the body—that sensation is not ancillary to understanding but constitutive of it.
My approach has personal resonance. I live with narcolepsy, a sleep disorder and disability which causes me to experience a kind of time collapse and memory loss due to extreme fatigue. This shapes my interest in the compression of timescales, both biologic and geologic, and on some level, my work attempts to make this compression somatically felt, as I experience it.
My work and participatory artworks have been exhibited by the Nobel Prize Museum, Pioneer Works, Honolulu Biennial, The Wellcome Collection, The Centre for Sensory Studies, EMPAC, MIT, and HESSE FLATOW.
I received a B.A. in Mass Communications (Media) with a minor in Fine Art from Boston University, and an M.A. in Food Studies from New York University. I worked as a photo editor and art director for award-winning media brands including Bon Appétit and Saveur Magazine. I currently adjunct teach at NYU and host an interdisciplinary Anthropocene working group.
I am the cofounder of MUTAMUR, a radio show on Montez Press Radio featuring collaborations with sound artists, critical game design scholars, computational architects, and practitioners in art-and-technology spaces, including Peter Burr, Miriam Simun, Hans Tursack, and Matthew Gantt. The experimental format was driven by research and creative practices in posthumanist and futurist thought.
Please email directly for more information on editorial and commercial work as a producer and photo editor. Production, styling, and photo editing samples can be found here ⇝
