EFA STUDIO PROGRAM: Member Artists
Allen Thomas Ball
Allen Ball (b. 1993, Green Cove Springs, Florida) is a New York-based artist whose work brings together painting, readymades, and sound to investigate infrastructure, geology, and visibility within built environments. Ball’s early encounters with the slow conversion of forest to subdivision inform a practice concerned with how systems of development shape perception while obscuring the historical and material conditions.
His Trace paintings on wood utilize pigments derived from hand-foraged clays and soils. These surfaces are obtained through multiple layers of paint applied over several days and then returned to the sites where their pigments were gathered; contact with the terrain mars their partially polymerized films. The resulting works function indexically as records of exposure, accumulation, and return and stand in for the material strata that persist beneath the urban grid.
At larger scales, Ball’s linen canvases are made with natural earth pigments and carbon black, condensing geological duration into dense surfaces. In his installations, Ball uses "surrogate" objects such as decommissioned high-pressure sodium streetlights to create systems of competing temporalities. By rendering familiar forms of public infrastructure newly confrontational, he stages spaces in which visibility, duration, and the body’s orientation remain unsettled
Ball holds an MFA from Pratt Institute (2019) and a BFA in Fine Art and Art History from the University of North Florida (2017). He maintains a studio at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York. While at Pratt, he was awarded the 2019 Graduate Student Engagement Fund. Selected exhibitions include solo and group presentations at the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, The Monira Foundation in Jersey City, and the Garment District Alliance Space for Public Art in New York.
