Allison Hrabluik

Letter to the Editor, a poster project by Allison Hrabluik, is in part an exercise in distribution. Only fifty identical posters are produced with the goal of slowly and subtly dispersing them through Vancouver in somewhat unexpected places. What starts in one of the Contemporary Art Gallery’s street front windows will slowly spread out over the course of two months. In this time frame, the artist will personally approach selected common use businesses, asking them to hang a poster from inside their windows. The poster format is a break from Hrabluik’s animation and video work, but retains a narrative format typical to her early work. The poster is a collage of images of small animals, dolls, twigs, and bugs, some of which she reproduced as watercolour paintings while others she left in photographic form. The content at first appears sweet, but turns foreboding as one begins to notice that all the animals are dead and the dolls glare unblinkingly.

Biography

Allison Hrabluik was born in Calgary, Alberta in 1974 and is currently based in Vancouver. She holds a BFA from the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, (1999) and has recently returned from Belgium where she just completed two years of graduate work at the Higher Institute for Fine Arts-Flanders, 2007. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Mercer Union, Toronto (2004); Video Pool. Winnipeg, (2006); Yukon Art Centre, Whitehorse (2006); Western Front, Vancouver (2006); Tatjana Pieters/One Twenty Gallery, Ghent (2006); Diaz Contemporary, Toronto (2007); and KW/AG, Kitchener-Waterloo (2008). Reviews of her work have been published in Artforum, C Magazine and Canadian Art. She has recently finished two new video works, A Mild Case of Small Pox, 2007 and A Question of Law, A Question of Fact and Another Question of Law, 2008.