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
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.
