Allie Tokarski: A Series of Works
by Allie Tokarski
My work is a practice of poking at the wound; I’m interested in pain and control. In particular, I focus on the subjective nature of reality, and the place that reality’s afterimages—dreams, memories—hold in the reconciliation between truth and emotion.
The paintings oscillate between legibility and abstraction, coherence and confusion. The work is representational but distorted, like a dream, featuring altered senses of space, time, and figure. As in memory, I amplify ostensibly minor details, giving them weight in their recall.
The body is an important subject in my work, acting as a vessel for the self and as a machine that actualizes abstract thoughts and emotions into actions and words. It is the vehicle through which we experience our world and the literal physical barrier between one person and the next. As such, it holds the record, keeps the score, acts as history corporeal; dissecting, examining, and reassembling is my way of making sense of it.
As the work progresses materially, it becomes a body in its own right, its unique history accumulating with each action I take against it. In replicating the visual cues of dreams and memories, the art object becomes a relic—the combination of material history and visual narrative both suspends and sanctifies specific moments in time, creating a space for reflection on both the past and the future.
