Stuart Allen is an artist whose work deals with fundamental elements of perception such as light, time, gravity and space. He has shown photographs, kites and sculpture in galleries and museums throughout the U.S. and abroad. His work is found in many private and public collections including the Tokyo Kite Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, the DiRosa Art Preserve, UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, and U.S. Embassy collections in Canada, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, and the Republic of Georgia.
Allen has completed permanent public art commissions for the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa, Canada and the Police Headquarters building in Davis, CA. His work has been published in a variety of books and journals including: Picturing California’s Other Landscape: the Great Central Valley, Terra Nova: Nature and Culture, You Are Here: the Journal of Creative Geography, Zyzzyva and Artweek. Allen has lectured or served as a visiting artist at many fine institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Weisman Art Museum, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and a number of university art departments nationwide.
Allen studied architecture at Kansas University and graduated from the photography and video department of the Kansas City Art Institute in 1994. He lives in San Antonio, Texas with his wife Kelly Lyons, their daughter Aidan and son Vincent.
Allen is represented by the following galleries: PDNB, Dallas, TX; JayJay, Sacramento, CA; Jan Manton Art, Brisbane, Australia; Haw Contemporary, Kansas City, MO.
Stuart Allen, artist, photographer, sculptor, public art, kite, kite maker, art consultant, Jayjay, haw contemporary, pdnb gallery, science and art
A continuation of the Low Resolution series, produced for an exhibition at the Wichita Art Museum in 2015.
From the Curator’s Statement. Courtesy of the Wichita Art Museum.
Wichita-born artist Stuart Allen tests the boundaries of landscape imagery in this series of photographs. Each artwork is a distilled from a digitally scanned photograph of Kansas. “The source images are reminders of my youth in Wichita and the open landscapes of Kansas: throwing snowballs with my brother in our front yard, sailing on Cheney Lake, driving out west during college road trips,” Allen notes.
Cropped and magnified to reveal only a few pixels from the original scan, the artist strives to maintain a sense of the original photograph. “While a nine-pixel photograph may render a decidedly abstract version of its subject, it remains a photograph: a record of light, in one place, in one time,” Allen states.
The resulting images are beautiful chromatic compositions with gentle color shifts that poetically invoke not just the moment of the image’s capture but also the distinctive landscape of the Midwest. “Though they no longer refer to the pictorial character of landscape,” the artist comments, “they do speak to the specific color and quality of light present in one moment, in one particular place on Earth.”
For more information about this series click here for an artist’s statement.
