Allison Leigh Holt

Allison Leigh Holt combines various media including moving image, sculpture, sound, performance, and print. In work ranging from hand-mapped video-sculpture to audivisual installations to diagrams, she constructs models and environments that draw attention to the continual interpenetration between perception, belief and cognition, between dreaming and waking consciousness, and between tangible and alternate realities. Her work is a developing system of tools for viewing the tacit matrix that joins these worlds, and for imagining the apparatus that governs them.

The tatal pawukon, for example, is a traditional Javanese device expressing time in terms of infinite, cyclical patterns of natural and supernatural forces. Each day reveals an intersecting complex of these energies, expressed in compressed detail as a single symbol carved in a block of wood. The ancient system within which the tatal functions allows the Javanese to navigate phenomenological human experience; it also closely resembles Holt’s own concepts of contemporary reality, consciousness and cognition, illuminating issues at the heart of her artistic inquiry.

At the core of Holt’s work lies a fascination with the templates we place upon reality, and how systems of belief construct experiences of reality that can differ fundamentally, resulting in an extraordinary diversity in ways of knowing. Through her research-based process, which includes experiencing phenomena, altered states, and rituals directly and creating models from her inquiry she reveals the frameworks concealed within them, activating and giving form to what cannot be contained in words. Holt is interested in incorporating new media with traditional knowledge, and reciprocally, using structures within the latter to drive technological development at a point when ways of knowing are globally dying out.

Holt is the recipient of a J. William Fulbright Fellowship (Indonesia), a San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist grant, and a 2012 SFMOMA SECA Award nomination. Her work has been shown at such venues as SFMOMA; Stanford University; Headlands Center for the Arts; the ZERO1 Biennial; Axiom Gallery for New and Experimental Media (solo); Cemeti Art House (solo, Indonesia); the Boston Cyberarts Festival; the Yogyakarta International New Media Festival (Indonesia); and the Urban Screens Conference (Australia). Holt has been a resident artist at Cemeti Art House, the Experimental Television Center, and Kala Art Institute; and a visiting artist at UC Santa Barbara, Institut Seni Indonesia, and North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics. She has served on such panels as cellsBUTTON, Video Vortex (both, Indonesia), the Cultural Studies Association (Columbia College), the 2013 Djerassi / Leonardo selection committee, and Louise Bourgeois’ Sunday Salon. Holding an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art, she is based in San Francisco.