airplay

Rachel Allen (Nez Perce)
January 23 - March 14, 2020

Urbano is proud to feature airplay, a site-specific interactive installation by Rachel Allen (Nez Perce) and the culmination of her Fall 2019 artist residency at Urbano Project. 

Breathing is a voluntary and involuntary function. Sometimes we are conscious of our breaths, or made aware of our breathing air’s origin. But these moments come infrequently. The same can be said of our ideologies. There are times when we purposefully take in and accept, or reject. But often belief systems are so pervasive and invisible, they are obtained without conscious thought.

I aim to unsettle the air we breathe and otherwise manipulate. If we consider the ubiquitous material we are suspended in, then we can begin to contemplate what seems invisible, like beliefs we uncritically accept. We might examine the political, cultural, and environmental implications of atmosphere and sky.

Buttons throughout the installation can be pressed to move air around this space. The inflated forms reference stories from my Nez Perce culture. Indigenous cosmologies can teach us how to attend to the air and reaffirm our connections to nonhumans. I invite the audience to intentionally interact with air, understand its agency, and recall our interconnectedness. Perhaps then we will start to breathe easier.
– Rachel Allen (Nez Perce)

Press Features
Broadway World

About the Artist:

Rachel Allen (Nez Perce) is an artist and curator, exhibiting her artwork and presenting on her scholarship nationally. An Assistant Curator at the Peabody Essex Museum, she recently exhibited at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University.  She has dual citizenship with the United States and with her Native nations, the Nez Perce Tribe of Idaho. Allen holds an MFA in Printmaking and an MA in Arts & Cultural Management and Museum Studies from Michigan State University. She received her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art. 

Visit her website & follow her on Instagram @rachel_c_allen

As Artist-in-Residence, Allen provided tools for Urbano’s youth artists to create place-worlds, or stories upon close examination of the land and their environment.  Students have researched the recent and ancient history of a location of their choice from a variety of facets–municipal, social, geological, current conditions, personal connections and their stories sharing happened through oral tellings or performances, and artist books.