Un/Bearing

"Un/Bearing" presents a new body of installation-based sculptures that confront the politics embedded in monuments, architecture, and the myths of American stability. Built from stacked cinder blocks, steel scaffolding, cast metal objects, and salvaged architectural materials, the works construct unstable civic structures that appear both under construction and on the verge of collapse.

Traditional monuments project permanence, authority, and national unity. These structures refuse that fiction. Instead they lean, cantilever, and remain visibly braced — exposing the labor, repair, and improvisation that actually hold systems together. Cheap, readily available materials such as cinder blocks and construction hardware become the foundation for monumental scale, foregrounding the relationship between architecture, class politics, and the labor that builds the world but is rarely commemorated within it.

Embedded within the structures are cast artifacts drawn from working-class life. Their presence shifts the monument away from state power and toward the people who sustain society through invisible labor.

Responding to Buffalo's industrial landscape, the installation treats the gallery as a site of civic tension. These scaffold-like anti-monuments resist nationalist spectacle and instead expose the precarity underlying economic systems — structures that demand endurance while denying stability.

Bio

Allison Baker is an Associate Professor of Fine Art- Sculpture in the Herron School of Art at Indiana University Indianapolis. Allison is a first-generation college student that earned her MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Her work and monumental public sculptures memorialize the complexities of late-stage capitalism, illuminating the aspirations and struggles of the American working class and working poor. Allison seeks to build monuments that challenge dominant narratives, humanize the ripple effects of poverty, and create work that the American working class and working poor can see as a reflection of their own experiences in gallery and museum spaces where their existence is seldom represented holistically.

Allison has exhibited widely nationally and internationally including the South Bend Museum of Art, CICA Museum, Spartanburg Art Museum, Hashimoto Contemporary, and Franconia Sculpture Park where her largest public sculpture is currently exhibited.