Alison Kudlow captures glass in mid-motion, resulting in works best described with verbs. With glass pooling, oozing, and bulging from ceramic forms, each sculpture feels precarious, like a moment that cannot last.

She develops kiln programs to heat the glass until it is viscous and then quickly drop the temperature to pause the drips, giving my materials agency to embody heat, gravity, and time. Her sculptures, arrested in motion, reflect a refusal to accept impermanence. The work is a response to grief, both personal and environmental. As if moving too slowly to perceive, they imply a glacial pace, challenging anthropocentric notions of time

She explores the slipperiness of categories, producing bodily ceramic sculptures that simultaneously resemble fruits, geodes, and undersea creatures. She complicates their seemingly organic form and fragile materiality with metal interventions that reference the built environment. The sculptures suggest a fuzziness between human and human-made, plant and mineral, troubling categorization and connoting infinite fluid possibilities.

_____

Alison Kudlow (b. 1981) lives and works in Brooklyn. She earned a BA from the University of Southern California, a post-baccalaureate degree from Brandeis University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Studio Art. She has shown at numerous galleries including Field Projects, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Flux Factory, UrbanGlass, Deanna Evans Projects, Doppelgänger Projects, Paradice Palase, Underdonk, Wavelength Space, and at Fullerton College in California. She presented a solo show, Meaningful Rituals in Irrational Times, at Elijah Wheat Showroom’s Brooklyn location in 2019. She was an invited resident at the Art Ichol Center in Maihar, Madhya Pradesh, India in January 2023. She will be presenting a solo show at Deanna Evans Projects in Tribeca, NY May 17-June 22, 2024.