Alli Hoag, Lucent Bodies

Artist Biography

Alli Hoag works across mediums of glass, installation, video, and performance to investigate the human desire to connect with the unknowable, and to reveal the simultaneous lightness and heaviness that is created when the imagined or invisible is labored into the physical realm. She exhibits and attends residencies internationally and nationally, with upcoming participation in the Bulgaria Glass Biennale 2025, and most recently in residence as a David Whitehouse artist researcher at Corning Museum of Glass in 2024. She promotes opportunities for artists and creatives through participation on the steering committee of the NSG Arts/Industry Intersection project since its inception in 2018. Alli completed her BFA degree in glass at University of Hawaii at Manoa, graduated with a Masters in Fine Art from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, and currently serves as Associate Professor of Glass and Glass Area Head at Bowling Green State University, in Bowling Green, OH.

Artist Statement

We select, we measure, we order, we map. These actions record surface and distance. Our experience is a process of relating to a world outside of ourselves, an other. We form intimacy with foreign bodies by a colliding of skin. Intimacy, while describing a sense of closeness, simultaneously reveals the inescapable condition of distance that is the boundary of one’s own skin. To be human is to be driven by the desire to bridge this gap.

I find that the trajectory of my artwork investigates the material qualities of glass to oscillate between a vocabulary of connection and uncertainty. In concert with these material values, the participatory role of the viewer has become the connective tissue throughout the body of work, through phenomenological and somesthetic lenses, where the viewer’s embodied subjectivity completes the work.

On a core level, I value the ability for art to give the gift of seeing something different, something that demands a deeper form of looking. When we physically see something, the activation of cones and rods in the eye are translated into patterns that the brain interprets and names. Familiar patterns are easily recognized by the brain and disregarded; but something out of the ordinary disrupts the comfortable monotony and forces the brain to approach and question what they are experiencing. Confusing images or moments, and/or a moment of seeing more than you imagined you could are all mechanisms in my body of work to woo the viewer into extended looking, of being present in an encounter.

The title of this exhibition, Lucent Bodies, explores the unique and expansive definition of this word-body. The word body can refer to the self, another organism, a corpse, a planet (heavenly body), and even the ocean (body of water). Words generally define and distance the other from the self, however, the word body acknowledges our lived experience as parallel with all the entities in the world and worlds around us. We are a collection of bodies- perhaps tied together linguistically for our capacity to host life at one point? I hope this exhibition invites deeper reflection on the commonality of the word "body" and to inspire consideration of expanded, shared experiences.

Slideshow - Alli Hoag Art & Design Alli Hoag's art and design portfolio and store