Allyson Vieira

Allyson Vieira’s sculpture, installations, and paintings feature small, accumulated marks, which together make up complicated, near-monolithic objects and images. Working with fragile material such as plaster, drywall, and gouache, Vieira’s process involves layering gestures so as to create works that appear simultaneously ancient and contemporary, immovable and impermanent.

Her 2010 installation If I was a… but then again, no (1-18) is comprised of 18 stelae of stacked dry wall, covered in plaster and concrete, leaning slightly precariously. Vieira’s investigation of common materials in unlikely ways, in addition to her exploration of how complicated and semi-uniform structures can be built out of imprecise objects and gestures, serve as means by which to examine how we shape a coherent world out of disparate and uncoordinated parts.

Vieira has shown her work around the world since 2004, with exhibitions at the Athens Biennial, the Queens Museum of Art, Kunsthalle Basel, the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, and the Swiss Institute in New York.