Allison Hunter
Zoosphere
March 12 – April 17, 2010
Opening Reception: Friday, March 12, 2010, 6 – 8pm
DiverseWorks Main Gallery
Special FotoFest gallery hours: Monday-Saturday, Noon-6pm

Zoosphere is a transcendent, site-specific installation investigating humankind’s relationship to the natural world. In her first ever immersive video installation, Hunter upends the power dynamic between the human and non-human animal within a dark, mazelike environment in which the man and beast co-mingle. Drawing on the experience of a visit to the zoo, audiences will travel through a a subdivided series of exhibition galleries filled with life-size projections of zoo animals devoid of any natural animal sounds (trumpeting elephants, birds in flight, herding zebras, barking sea lions, etc.) Against the backdrop of a rapidly shifting ecological landscape in which species across the globe are threatened with extinction, Zoosphere reconnects humanity with the beauty and wonder of the animal kingdom and forces us to examine our relationship with and responsibility to it.

ABOUT ALLISON HUNTER
Allison Hunter is a visual artist who over the past twenty years has worked in photography, performance, video, painting, drawing, and installation.  Hunter earned her first MFA at the Cantonal Art School of Lausanne, Switzerland (1990), and her second MFA at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York (1997).  Hunter participated in international video and sculpture art residencies at institutions such as the Banff Centre for the Arts in Calgary, Canada and the Hermit Center for Metamedia in Plasy, Czech Republic. Hunter's installation project, titled SIGNMAKERS (1983-2003), was commissioned by three European sculpture centers in Lithuania, Latvia, and Finland, and by the 2003 Kingston Sculpture Biennial in New York.  Hunter's photographs are collected by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the University Art Museum at SUNY, the Albany Institute of History and Art, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock.  Her work  has been included in numerous exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe, including at the Kohler Center (Wisconsin), Arthouse (Austin), and in solo exhibitions at Women & Their Work (Austin), and Artspace (North Carolina), among others.

In addition to practicing art, Hunter has participated in the art community as an educator, writer, and art administrator.  She taught computer art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and at the University at Albany (SUNY).  She has written and edited texts on visual art and design for national publications such as HOW and Sculpture.  Hunter was Executive Director for the Houston Center for Photography (2005-06), Artistic Director for De Santos Gallery (2004), and Curatorial Assistant at the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery (2001). She lives in Houston, Texas.

www.allisonhunter.com