Meet Allison Peck

Today we’d like to introduce you to Allison Peck.

Allison, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
Growing up in Sacramento, I knew from my first conscious moments that art was my calling. When I graduated high school, I moved to LA to study art at Occidental. After graduation, I taught art in continuation schools, camps, and underserved neighborhoods for a few years. Nearing burnout from health issues and working multiple jobs, I knew something had to change. I enrolled in the MFA program at Otis in 2012.

There, my art practice was totally transformed by theory classes, critiques, studio visits, and constant art production and exhibition. At the end of two great years of art making and discourse, I was elated and fulfilled. But I was also past the point of burnout, and my health was wrecked. By 2015, it felt like I was starting over (slightly dramatic, but I am Sagittarius) – a relationship ended, I moved twice, went into debt, and often felt barely alive. In retrospect, these were the best things that could have happened.

I finally started asking for help from the right people and practiced unburdening myself from the expectations of those who didn’t quite understand. I found my way to lots of different healers and teachers. I put together some shows I am very proud of. My teaching work and personal life got really awesome. Going deeper into both spiritual and art practices, I began to sense freedom coming.

Within the past year, I experienced a major shift. I decided to make art that felt more like me, and “me” felt like filming myself dancing in the desert wearing weird outfits that I sewed myself. Think Pina Bausch meets Andrea Zittel meets goth, pagan, higher-dimensional witchcraft. I chose the desert because I wanted to come into resonance with its vibration/frequency/energy. The desert is the one place I can truly hear myself and simultaneously feel the full, expansive, infinitely complex oneness of the universe.

So, eight times vaguely around the eight pagan holidays, I danced alone in the desert, wearing my handmade pieces and calling in healing – for my self, my body, and every human, animal, and earth entity suffering under the current paradigm. It felt like so much. Each time, something new was released, and I got my power back a little more.

Has it been a smooth road?
There have been struggles, but I’ve mostly made friends with them and thanked them for being formative and informative. Looking back on my journey, I know I made it through because of the support and gifts I received from my incredible group of friends and family. If I’ve learned anything along the way, it is that everyone is struggling with something.

Personally, I’ve dealt with plenty of physical and mental health issues, including intense anxiety and undiagnosed ADD. Since before I can remember, it has been hard, if not impossible, to get out of my head and into action. It feels like I have 1,000 tabs open in my brain at any given time, causing a sort of paralysis.

Though ADD diagnoses tend to get a bad rap, it was super helpful for me to own it and seek help. This enabled me to work with different treatments and coping mechanisms, and also led me to embrace the ways in which my brain works differently. I can appreciate how these differences feed my creativity, allowing me to understand and create connections on a broad scale.

Art has been an invaluable portal to self-knowledge. It took a long time to find my way back to myself, but my art practice leads me home whenever I feel lost. It gives freedom and empowerment, autonomy and agency, humor and clarity, every time.

The next step is starting a business platform to support myself and other womxn, femme, trans, and non-binary artists. I envision this business living at the intersection of contemporary art, fashion, movement, and mysticism. Empowering the feminine within ourselves and every other aspect of life is the best way heal and thrive.

We’d love to hear more about what you do.
I mostly make site-conscious installations that address the site as an individualistic, living entity. Instead of framing the work within a rectangle, I use the space as the frame. For me, the installation is a material expression of language, with each piece acting as a phrase, sentence, or block of thought. Every visual moment is part of a fragmented whole, like a painting expanded into multi-dimensions, waiting for the viewer to fill the rest in.

I like considering space through the lens of both quantum physics and spirituality – in the way that most actions or interactions comprising our existence take place in subatomic spaces that remain unseen and often unperceived. There is much more to existence than what we experience through our senses. It could be called magic, or energy, or a deeper understanding. I want to use my knowledge to articulate our interrelatedness and visually imagine a radical future.

Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and the least?
I like that our city encompasses so much. I really believe that whatever you’re looking for, you can find it here. The scenes in LA are like parallel universes, each one existing simultaneously, almost right on top of each other, and not necessarily ever encountering one another.

Economic disparity and social injustice are the worst parts of our city. Everyone should be able to live with dignity and without fear of criminalization, violence, erasure, deprivation, or destitution. So much needs to be healed, including the land we live on and tend to exploit. It would be great if we were the first city to ban animal agriculture and commit to environmental regeneration and sustainable archology, among other things.

Contact Info:

• Website: allisonpeck.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: @allisonjosephine; @some_do_magic
• Facebook: allison.josephine

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