alliewist [at] gmail [dot] com
Allie E.S. Wist is an artist, scholar, and PhD candidate in the interdisciplinary Arts program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where she researches the nature of the “natural.”
She allegedly has ancestors from the black forest of Bavaria, although her post industrial heritage from growing up in a steel town in Western Pennsylvania echoes more recognizably. She likes to dig up memories but often does not know what to do with them.
Wist works across environmental humanities, sensory studies, and new materialism. Her practice spans photography, video, edible and olfactory artifacts, radio broadcasts, and installations that often question the binary between the human and the “natural” in the Anthropocene. Her work draws on feminist and New Materialist scholarship to question how scientific knowledge is produced and to explore the interplay between purity politics and toxicity through cultural objects.
Her dissertation focuses on how stratigraphy and geology relate to toxicity and embodiment, and how otherwise planetary-scale phenomena (characteristic of late industrialisms) can be apprehended through sensory traces. In particular, she takes seriously the role of eating, digesting, and the chemical senses (taste and smell) as forms of metabolic aesthetics. Her work draws on feminist and new materialist scholarship to question how scientific knowledge is produced, and to explore the interplay between purity politics and objectivity, often through cultural and social objects. Her work includes edible and olfactory artifacts, as well as photography and video, which come together most often in multi-modal or immersive installations documenting the slippages between the human and the ‘natural.’ Her work has been shown by Honolulu Biennial, The Wellcome Collection, MIT, and the Nobel Prize Museum, and it has been covered by the BBC, NPR, and The New York Times. She spent over a decade as a photo director for media outlets in NYC, most recently at Bon Appétit (Condé Nast). She is from a small steel town outside of Pittsburgh, and currently lives in Troy, NY.
Wist’s work and workshops have been exhibited with Honolulu Biennial, the Nobel Prize Museum, Pioneer Works, the Wellcome Collection, The Centre for Sensory Studies, EMPAC, and Hesse Flatow, and has been featured in the New York Times, Hyperallergic, the BCC, NPR, and more. She previously worked for a decade in food media, most recently as a photo editor for Bon Appétit.
Recent interview for Prairie Ronde ⇝
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 ⇝
