Avrie Allen

MFA Graphic Design

countersense

countersense is an engagement with embodied experience and the conditions that shape it—and the sense we make of it. countersense is a counterhegemonic practice of sense-making, performed between perception and meaning-making, self and material conditions, always foregrounding what politics are chosen as a result of the personal.

Someone holding a blue fabric print up to the sky that reads "what if I looked at the houses, and the air, and the streets

The houses, the air, the streets
10 8.5x11"
Silk Organza prints, metal grommets, binder rings

The houses, the air, the streets reuses text from the poem "June, 78" by Karen Brodine, but leaves the arrangement and meaning are open. The prints can be viewed together as a book—bound through the grommets with binder rings—taken apart and viewed individually, or rearranged and clipped together horizontally, creating a modular, rearrangeable and interactive publication. Printed on transparent silk organza, each print functions as a filter of the immediate environment. The prints offer a plane to make open-ended connections between color, personal association, and environmental context, prompted by the printed excerpts.

Colorful poster created by hand-arranging cutout text excerpts of a poem by Karen Brodine; each cutout has a solid color background and black sans serif text

fragments of a future

A poster arranged by hand, using June, 78 by Karen Brodine as source material. The last stanza of the poem—envisioning a future in which we and our communities are actually well—is fragmented and rearranged into a new text.

A blue and yellow-gold typographic textile on grass

everyday uptopia
jacquard-woven textile

everyday utopia is a typographic jacquard-woven textile inspired by "a decolonial feminism" by François Vergès.

Yik Heng Lee (RISD MFA TX 26) interpreted the digital design by Jacob Marcus (RISD MFA GD 27) and I, indexing graphic pixels into woven structures and form.

Girlhood Arrested
book, workshop, interviews

What began as a zine and self-publishing workshop for the formerly incarcrerated narrators with The Visiting Room Project (TVRP) developed into this book, Girlhood Arrested. With post-workshop interviews and writings, it is a reflection on the Girlhood Zine Workshop, dualities of carcerality/punishment and play/resistance, the possibilities of girlhood as an organizing construct of self outside of incarceration, and is a transhistorical engagement with the archival gaps of women's lives and stories.

10 prints that read "To Measure is to Rationalize, to Rationalize is to Control" together, arranged into a 1:1 scale of the designer's body

On Measurement
10 double-sided 6x9" prints

10 prints interpreting and responding to Albrecht Dürer's 1528 book "Instructions on Measurement". Side 1 interprets the work through Aristotle's 10 categories, and side 2 considers modern developments of the rationalization of the body, from 1528 to today.

An installation critical of AI, showing an iMac within a sculpted rock on a pedestal, various red, black, and tan typographic objects on walls

luddite.com/munity
multimedia installation; typeface and stencils made from OpenAI logo; iMac encased in sculpted rock; misc. typographic objects