Allen’s medium of choice is recycled newspapers and magazines that are mixed with a slurry of reclaimed clay.
He then turns these newly formed newspaper pages into pages of books, globes, mechanical components and human figures. From these four recurring elements his work is born and Allen’s exploration of the “impact of information, technology, knowledge and globalization on both individual and universal levels” begins. His goal is to “recontextualize contemporary issues inspired by articles in the same recycled newspapers and magazines.”
In his work one can see how books form the foundation of Allen’s attempt to make sense of the world.
New World
Fruits of Labor
Agents of Change
one also gets a sense of the tremendous weight of knowledge and the struggle to create something positive from its pursuit.
Another theme Allen works with is the global ramifications of a knowledge based society.
In Allen’s recent piece Allowances and Tolerances he takes a “common term used in machining to define the permissible limit of variation and brings it into a social context. The text is taken from the Machinist’s Handbook and combined with text from Will Durant’s The History of Civilization. It is brought together in one book to make a comment on the global need for societal and cross-cultural tolerance.”
I asked Allen about this combining of history of technology to illuminate the need for global tolerance and he offered this “Allowances and Tolerances is the first of what might be a series of pieces that take terminology from technology handbooks and bring them into a social context. I was a machinist for many years and was struck by machining terms that have a different social meaning when taken out of context. I am all for more tolerance in the world.”
And then there is Grandpa which is a distinct departure from his other work. Here the book is alone and not entwined with other symbolism. It is more of a book art piece. The dominate image being a tractor and a number of pages suspended in the air. It lacks the struggle inherent in his other pieces this sort of idyllic agrarian imagery, with the wavy pages (amber waves of grain) and the tractor imagery seems out of place. Allen says of this piece “Grandpa is a piece of my own history. When I think of my grandpa, I think of the Ford tractor he used to ride around on…The book started from a photograph I took of his tractor, then I added some images and text I found online to supplement it. I considered sculpting a tractor to move through the pages the way the globe does in other pieces , but ultimatelty wanted the images on the pages to be unobstructed.”