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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
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Archive

November 23, 2016

Kelvin

Kelvin, 2016
23,040 LED lights, stainless steel tubing, light sensor, microprocessor, data server
12.5′ x 11.5′ x 11.5′

Permanent installation: Weston Centre, San Antonio, TX

7,200 feet of LED wire with 23,040 individual amber and blue lights hangs from an 11.5 x 11.5 foot stainless steel frame. A light sensor is installed on the roof of the building that communicates with a microprocessor on the first floor. The sensor reads the color of daylight and translates that data to the sculpture, which responds by shifting between the amber and blue color channels throughout the day.

Kelvin was commissioned by Weston Properties, LC in 2015.

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Electrical Engineering by Andrew Davis, Digital Toy Factory, Lockhart, TX

Stainless Fabrication by Capital Bending, Austin, TX

For more information about Kelvin: CLICK HERE

October 6, 2015

Kite Table

Kite Table, 2015
galvanized steel, powder coated steel
table: 10′ x 6′ x 32″
light fixture: 15′ x 6′ x 18″

Permanent installation: Hemisfair Park, San Antonio, TX

The Kite Table is a platform for gathering and a cross-cultural reference point. The form is derived from folded paper, but fabricated with plate steel. The table top is an abstracted reference to a diamond kite, the most recognizable of western kite shapes. Etched onto the surface of the table are diagrams for making kites from four different countries: Japan, Korea, Guatemala and the United States – all countries that had a presence during the HemisFair ’68 World’s Fair. In addition to the diagram, a web address is etched into the surface where visitors can find additional information about the construction and cultural significance of each kite style. Standing next to the table is a custom light fixture that references a kite in flight.

The kite-making instructions on the table’s surface are explicit, but the primary intent is to inspire individuals and families to engage in a fulfilling outdoor activity. In this sense, the table is a conceptual object, suggesting the potential of open public space coupled with imagination.

For more information about the Kite Table: CLICK HERE

Collection of the City of San Antonio, commissioned through Public Art San Antonio.

September 16, 2015

Glass

Glass is a series of macro photographs of palm-sized pyrex objects made by San Antonio artist Justin Parr. Through the combined lenses of the camera and these glass objects we see an interpretation of the landscape. The features of the land, though slightly visible in some images, are largely lost to the refractions and reflections of light imposed by the glass. We are left with traces of information, mostly color – subtle suggestions of place and time.

May 4, 2015

Kansas

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.

September 24, 2014

Soap Bubbles

This series exploits an optical phenomenon that occurs when visible light is distorted by the thin film membrane of a soap bubble. Soap bubbles deconstruct daylight, amplifying some wavelengths while canceling others out, creating an array of color that speaks to the complexity and mutability of what we see as ‘white’ light.

For more information about this series please click here for an artist’s statement.

December 11, 2014

Gaillardia pulchella and Lupinus texensis

Lupinus texensis (Texas Bluebonnet), 2013
auto-animating panels: fritted glass, acrylic, ink, l.e.d. light source
3 panels: each 48 x 48 inches

Gaillardia pulchella (Indian Blanket), 2013
auto-animating panels: fritted glass, acrylic, ink, l.e.d. light source
4 panels: each 16 x 56 inches

Permanent Installation: Trinity University, Center for Sciences and Innovation

The colors embedded in these auto-animating panels are drawn from Texas native wildflowers: Gaillardia pulchella and Lupinus texensis. The artist extracted single points of color from photographs of the flowers to build the palettes for the artwork. The assembly of each frame includes a layer of ceramic fritted glass, an array of thin colored lines printed on a layer of clear acrylic, a light diffusion layer, and an l.e.d. light source. The precise relationship between the frequency of the printed colors and the fritted lines of the glass layer results in the color shifting phenomenon you witness as you move past the panels.

December 2, 2014

Low Resolution Kites

Low Resolution Kites, 2010
pigment prints on Tyvek, bamboo, string, 2010
dimensions – square: 35″ x 25″, tall: 84″ x  19″

from the Artist Statement:

Regardless of its size in the studio or on the ground, any kite will be eaten up by the enormity of the sky. It’s humbling to spend days or months working on a large piece, then send it aloft and watch it sink into the vastness of the sky. Kites are designed to recede in space – to travel away from the viewer. I am interested in playing with that change in viewing distance. Up close, the heavily pixilated imagery is an abstraction. Viewed from a distance the pixels resolve into a recognizable image.

January 14, 2015

Color Shift

Three colors are extracted from a digital photograph. The colors are used to construct a pigment print made up of thin vertical lines in a repeating pattern. The print is placed behind a 1/4″ thick piece of architectural glass with a ceramic-frit line pattern on the front. Due to the very precise relationship between the lines in the print and the line pattern of the glass, the works appear to change color as the viewer moves relative to the piece. The location of the original photograph and the source of the colors are indicated in small text along the bottom of the print.

Though the panels themselves are static, the movement of the viewer initiates a dynamic, animated effect. Without movement they are fields of color. With movement, time and space are activated to create a more complex engagement.

December 2, 2014

Aloft

Aloft, 2010
U.V. ink on aluminum, string
5 pieces: each 9′ x 2′ x 80′

temporary installation: San Antonio International Airport
permanent installation: Rackspace, San Antonio, TX

Panel text courtesy of Rackspace:

Allen has been working with kites since the early 1990’s. He has constructed hundreds of them, from tiny objects flown on a thread, to aluminum sails designed to fly underwater, to huge paper and bamboo kites that require several adults to manage. The installation at Rackspace, entitled ALOFT, incorporates five kite forms that are based on traditional Japanese kite designs. Extremely low-resolution images of the sky are printed on the aluminum surface of the kites. Allen explains the connection between the imagery and kites as follows:

Regardless of its size in the studio or on the ground, any kite will be eaten up by the enormity of the sky. It’s humbling to spend days or months working on a large piece and then send it aloft to watch it sink into the vastness of the sky. Kites are designed to recede in space – to travel away from the viewer. I am interested in playing with that change in viewing distance. Up close, the heavily pixilated imagery is an abstraction. Viewed from a distance the pixels resolve into a recognizable image.