Allison Hrabluik’s video work The Splits, intersects documentary and fiction through a series of performances that demonstrate the skills of disparate talents, ranging from tap dancers, gymnasts, skippers, and other everyday artists of the bodily gesture. Performed on the stage of a community centre, the acts are now recontextualized by their presentation as a video installation in the gallery space. The culmination of a community centre’s stage, crisp audio and the close cropping, become devices that connect what might otherwise be a random grouping of people, isolating and highlighting their actions. The result is a form of abstract storytelling in which a generalized survey of practiced human movement reveals a narrative of characters, “giving way to a carnivalesque collectivity, competitive eating and hula hooping become interchangeable expressions of humanity."

The cast includes real-life performers whose skills range from the mundane to the extraordinary: a singer, a pizza dough thrower, speed skippers and dog trainers. Scissors clip, a rope whirs, the sound of a mouth harp interrupts an operatic scream.

Allison Hrabluik lives and works in Vancouver. Her work includes video, sculpture, animation, drawing, performance and text, often with a focus on the relationship between gesture and narrative.

Hrabluik graduated from Alberta College of Art and Design in 2015. She is currently a Sessional Faculty at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver. In 2014, she was long listed for Sobey Art Award. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including: Vancouver Art Gallery, Diaz Contemporary, Simon Fraser University Gallery, Galerie Tatjana Pieters, Gent, Western Bridge, Seattle and Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge.