Physical Media Forever
Mixed media artist, design enthusiast, and writer Allyson Martel, uses reels harvested from VHS tapes and the cases themselves, to create inhabitable structures and freestanding pieces designed to cradle the viewer in a movie, music, and media aesthetic.
Like any collector who needs just one more, Allyson amassed every conceivable type of physical media and set about doing anything with it except tossing it in the CULTURAL BURN-PILE.
Turns out, physical media is forever: It is not ephemera.
This post-brutalist, now existential brutalist era of art and design, punctuated by technological singularity, has left a wake of abandoned plastic—making the VHS tape particularly defunct. Harvesting VHS reels from encasement brings with it the knowledge that reel-pairs are each differently designed.
Allyson is a student of the circle and was the first to use VHS reels, and now the cases, in large-scale art and installation design with the aim of keeping physical media forever.
A portion of her collection resides in the Elizabeth Gallery at Artisan Works, 565 Blossom Rd, Rochester NY 14610.
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