Allison Hrabluik: The Splits

The Splits, Allison Hrabluik’s most recent major work, documents a series of performances that demonstrate the skills of tap dancers, gymnasts, skippers, and other everyday artists of the bodily gesture. Presented on a humble stage that suggests a community centre or elementary school, the acts are recontextualized by their presentation as part of a spectacular video installation in a gallery space, but above all by the attention of the artist, whose close observation and dense editing lends their movements a heightened intensity and rhythm. The result is a form of abstract storytelling in which a generalized survey of practiced human movement attains the narrative quality of character – its psychological, temporal and spatial specificity, its cares and its achievements, its trajectory and force. Allison Hrabluik lives and works in Vancouver. Her work includes video, sculpture, animation, drawing, performance and text, often with a focus on the relationship between gesture and narrative. It has been presented nationally and internationally, including exhibitions in Vancouver, Ghent, Seattle, Toronto and Winnipeg, and was included in Oh, Canada, a survey of Canadian contemporary art organized by the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) in 2012.