Three Questions for allison anne

What inspired your choice of medium?

My primary creative medium is collage — it really is at the heart of everything I do. With an interest in vintage material in addition to found and reclaimed materials, my work in collage, zinemaking, book art and mixed media explores the personal, the political and the sociocultural at various levels. It's a medium that both echoes and embodies the way I experience the world.

Can you walk us through your creative process for these works?

Abstraction is a reasonably intuitive process for me. I generally start with an image or scrap of ephemera that catches my eye. Generally, the process is about engaging in exploration, excavation, and making connections. Unless I'm doing client work or making something for a specific theme, I rarely set out to make a particular image — rather, I'm building an emotion, reaction, or feeling. I find a starting place, and look for other material that I feel connects in some way. It might be color, line, shape, subject... it might just be a feeling. I keep cutting, reshaping, pruning, pasting, slicing, trimming until it feels just right, until it feels complete.

What is the significance of the work to you?

Handcut analog collage is my visual diary, illuminating the interior by drawing out connections with the exterior — a constantly evolving exploration seen through the reconstitution of various printed media and ephemera culled from external sources. By fragmenting and rearranging what was once whole, the use of these rescued, found or recycled materials allows me to explore the relationships between context, materiality and identity.

Collage is a site of expansiveness and change, part of a creative ecosystem of transformative mediums that rethink how art can be shared. It reframes and pushes against capitalist ideas of ‘value’ while exploring different avenues of community-building and exchange. There’s an element of collage that has always felt inherently hybrid to me — remaking and restructuring, collaborating with the very world around us.

allison anne is a queer, nonbinary multidisciplinary artist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA (unceded Očhéthi Šakówin land), working in collage, zinemaking, mail art, mixed media & graphic design.

allison is a founding member of Twin Cities Collage Collective, a member of the International Union of Mail-Artists and several collaborative projects. With artist Jeremy P. Bushnell, they also publish and distribute publications by a diverse mix of artists around the world. As a believer in the transformative nature of self-publishing, allison also volunteers with the Workshop for Independent Publishing (WIP) in Minneapolis.

allison’s work has been widely published and exhibited, appearing in Create! Magazine, Contemporary Collage Magazine, and Cut Me Up Magazine amongst others. Their work can be seen in the permanent collections of the Scandinavian Collage Museum and the Minnesota Museum of American Art.

Web: allisonanne.com
Instagram: @allisonannecollage
Bluesky: @allisonanne.com