Allen Burgess is a transgender multimedia artist and instructor currently based in Olympia, Washington. He is a working and teaching artist at the beginning of his gallery career after a long and nurturing education under noted artists Karen Kosoglad, Larry Calkins, and most recently Kris Coffey and Bruce Thompson. An Evergreen graduate in the 2024 class, he earned a BA in material culture studies, creative writing and studio arts. Currently working with a focus in ceramics, linoleum printing and mix-media painting, his practice serves as a means to satisfy what he views as an innate, evolutionary urge to be in the process of making and learning by doing
These have come out of periods of introspection, relationship to my body, the relativity of my body to other living things. Within this work is a narrative of extraction, the use of no-longer mined ceramic materials, the use of new linoleum and very small carving tools, the use of reused, discarded plywood. There is a consideration in the mortality/longevity of the materials, what predeceases and ultimately successes a person in one’s memory, the nature of transformation affixed in the amoral base process of impact, impression, change. How do we mythologize? By what margins do we define fantasy and memory? What constancies keep something from being irreconcilably changed? Where am I, when I am remembered and when I am me?
