Allyson Vieira Work Description

Allyson Vieira is primarily a sculptor. She works in plaster, drywall, steel and concrete, though she also does gouache paintings. Much of her work deals with antiquity, material and construction, presenting the past through style, and the present through material. She's interested in how our building materials change over time. Vieria visited Greece to study classical architecture, and her senior thesis explored a modern extraction of 'marble' from a plaster quarry in her studio. The subject of her gouache paintings are plastic containers and paper cups. These loosely correlate with other works that explore modern materials and duration. Her sculptures are made of easily attainable materials such as concrete and steel studs.
Vieira has a fascination with ancient cultures, classical architecture and myths, and this fascination comes through in her work. Build On/Build Against exemplifies this interest. Build on/Build Against was a 2013 site-specific installation in France. Vieira created a labyrinth that filled an old room. The entire labyrinth was constructed of steel studs. A small sculpture hung at eye level in the center of the labyrinth. Vieira constructed the labyrinth so that it was narrow, but just wide enough for most people to walk through. The use of steel studs highlights Vieira's interest in material. As common building materials of our time, steel studs and drywall are the equivalent of limestone for ancient Egyptians. Vieria uses drywall for sculptures that appear in a few of her works. The sculptures are geometric, abstract contrapposto figures based on the three graces. The drywall is pressed together in horizontal layers, adding to the strong lines of the statues. In pairs, they hold up steel universal beams. Scattered boot-prints mark the beams. Vieira has recreated the same basic structure using different materials. Cinderblocks, Swiss modal brick, concrete. Her choice of materials is consistently based on their ordinary, everyday usage in building.
For 2351, she created plaster sculptures to explore movement. She asked herself questions like "What is the shape of clapping? How do you fossilize an action?" By repetitively creating actions in a poured concrete/plaster mix, Vieira was able to create a sort of visual, sculptural map of actions such as clapping, clawing, and poking.
 While her main focus is sculpture, Vieira has thrown in wild cards for some of her exhibitions. For Ozymandias, she added a live octopus in a back room. In Cortège, rectangular slabs were interrupted by a bronze sculpture of an octopus and a winged penis. For the exhibition The Plural Present, Vieira created sculptures of steel studs, plaster, swiss modal, and concrete. In a separate room, she showed a video of the world trade center being built. She's also created a print of the video from a camera obscura in another room. I appreciate the effect of these unexpected departures from her unified sculptural work. They keep Vieiras from being pigeonholed completely, they show her experimentation, and they allow viewers a respite from the rough-hewn nature of her primary sculptures. She explores the same themes in these wild cards, but from diverse perspectives and in diverse materials.