Toll
Allison Wiese is an interdisciplinary artist who makes sculptures, installations, sound works, and architectural interventions.
Artist BioToll is a monumental interactive sculpture; a mobile bell tower that attaches itself to institutions from curbside, allowing organizations and their communities to experiment with this most traditional of public voices. Designed for disassembly and transport with its large church bell installed in an open-air tower constructed from contractor’s scaffolding, Toll will park outside hosts and attach itself, via pulleys and cables, to a bell-pull indoors. Institutions negotiate their relationship to the bell, deciding when (opening reception, last call at the bar?), and by whom (curator, waitress?), it is rung. Bells traditionally announce fires, gatherings, births, marriages, deaths and revolts—unusual tragedies, mundane celebrations and anniversaries of both. Toll points to basic social structures and asks questions about their form, by enacting both its utopian wish for shared community and a trouble-making refusal of an absolute shared language. Who do we organize with and for what?
Allison Wiese
San Diego, CA
Allison Wiese is an interdisciplinary artist who makes sculptures, installations, sound works, and architectural interventions. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States, amongst other venues at Machine Project in L.A., the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego and Socrates Sculpture Park in New York. She is the recipient of a 2007 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and has received grants from Art Matters and the Cultural Arts Council of Houston. Wiese is a fellow of the MacDowell Colony, an alumna of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and was a Core Fellow of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from 2001 to 2003. She learned to walk and talk in Brooklyn, drive in Southern California and everything else important in Texas.