Allison Reimus is a New Jersey based artist with Midwestern roots. She approaches her work with empathy, sincerity, and unexpected deviance. Entanglements of domestic life with tongue in cheek cultural critiques are often present. Her paintings are made with collected fabrics like potholders, handkerchiefs, and clothing. The results upend the hierarchies around abstract painting. In the past few years, Reimus has exhibited in London, Chicago, and New York and last year was featured in the Golden Thread, a widely acclaimed group textile based exhibition, also in New York. This exhibition provided a personal revelation, that she was indeed a textile artist. Reimus is fierce in the duality of living in and rallying against assumptions – those of painting, motherhood, and what it means to be a woman – past and present. Her use of bold color blocking and loud text lead viewers to the understanding that Reimus is keenly aware of how her story presents and operates in the world. Currently working out of her garage home studio, she diligently shows up in the hours and minutes between domestic duties. Here we spoke about her studio schedule, her materials, and honoring women of the past while juggling being one today.

Interview Between Allison Reimus and Amy Boone-McCreesh, September, 2024

Amy: How do you structure your life as an artist? What does a typical day/ week look like?

Allison: Well, it depends on the season. Now that it’s fall and my youngest is in kindergarten, I’m able to come to the studio at 9:00am and stay until 2:30pm. And if I have a show or a deadline approaching, I’ll come back around 7:00pm after I drive the kids to all their random after school activities. The summer is a lot less predictable, more sporadic. That isn’t ideal but I try my best. Having the studio a short walk from the house (in a former detached garage) is wonderful for this season of my life though. I’ve been here for five years now.

Amy: Your work feels sweet but also not precious to me at the same time – can you talk about some of the materials like dryer lint, hot pads, towels, and other domestically related fabrics?

Allison:  I think I embody a lot of dualities. I grew up thinking that motherhood and being a serious artist didn’t go together. I think about “high art” and “low art” or craft or “women’s work”, like in their historical contexts. My priorities and thought process come out in the work naturally, I think. I do use a lot of unconventional materials, things that come from my second life as a mom, like dryer lint or bleach. You can see it on that one where I drew with toilet bowl cleaner. I can find interesting materials in a lot of boring places. Towels, dish cloths, hot pads, pot holders- I love sourcing these types of things from estate sales and thrift stores too. They look like they’ve lived a full domestic life by the time I find them. They have so much personality built in already. And the fancy stuff, like lace and embroideries, those were some old woman’s treasures and now they’re orphaned. They’re just just given away or sold or whatever. I feel like I need to honor them. I’m super aware of the fact that if I had been born, say 75 years ago, I wouldn’t be able to live the life I have now. I rarely incorporate found materials as-is though. I dye them, paint them, collage them, anything to make it feel more like a collaboration.

Amy: This sweetness is also mixed with a dark side, how do you come up with your titles?

Allison:  You’re not wrong. That’s probably my sarcasm and isn’t sarcasm usually rooted in something dark?  For the last, I want to say six or seven years, after I began sewing them before stretching, I started incorporating text by using the seams to create letters, and the letters serve as the blueprint of the composition. They’re not always legible. That’s fine with me though because it isn’t the point. I just get these words and phrases stuck in my head and I feel like I have to make something with that particular title or else I just can’t live. I’m only working on one right now that has text though. I’ve been getting away from that a little bit lately, but the majority of the work for the last five years has had text in it. The titles are always exactly what the painting says. But what’s fascinating, and it happens all the time, is that people seem to have no idea. Which tells me they’re “reading” the painting solely on composition and I love that. I’m not trying to hide the letters, I give it to them right there in the title but they just don’t always see it. It’s great. It’s not like I want to make paintings that are easy to read or that feel didactic. It’s like a reward for deep looking. The composition, the way it’s arranged, the color, shape, texture, whatever, is doing most of the work. I hope they’re painted in a manner that suits the title. There’s one I showed in London last winter that said, fuck you pay me. But it looks like this sweet, little grandma blanket. They are a little passive aggressive, I guess. Sarcastic.

Amy: I love how these paintings are so raw yet delicate – they feel uniquely feminine, full of both love and anger. Is it intentional or important that your work conveys elements of your personal experience in the world despite being abstract?

Allison: I don’t think that I could help it, even if I wanted to. I just have to make things that feel authentic to me. Sincerity is everything. I can’t get behind anything that I perceive as arbitrary. I really have to feel something in order to put my time into it. Maybe because my time is so limited. But yeah, how do you paint a feeling? Abstraction is the only way I’ve been able to arrive there. Examining the “feminine” is something I’ve always done, but this fascination with geometry, with the grid, or, simple shapes, which historically have been assigned to the masculine- I’m not quite sure why I do that. Maybe it’s a subconscious need to figure out how to exist in patriarchy? That alone is anger inducing. I also have a feeling that it stems from growing up in the Rust Belt. The streets are on a grid and everything is flat. I was not in the middle of nature. There were right angles everywhere I went. Houses, buildings, industry. It must be ingrained in me. Growing up, my understanding of labor or “work” was formed around the assembly line. In that part of Michigan, most people worked for the automobile industry. I thought that “work” meant that everyday, you do the same thing, the same movements, over and over again. Not a lot of room for delicacy or nuance. You go to work whether you want to or not and it’s just constant repetition, repetition, repetition. It’s just in my blood. Anyway, when I was young I used to worry about doing the “right” things to become an artist. I had to stop comparing myself to people with rich parents or people who went to art schools. I bet there was some anger and rawness involved there. Eventually I said fuck it, and just went for it unapologetically. I’m still going for it! Diving deep into who you are at your core is so freeing. The farther inward I go, the more universal the ideas are in a way. And the better the work gets.

Amy:  Your paintings are shaped, sometimes a cross or a symbol that mimics an intersection or crossroads? What does this symbol mean to you? 

Allison: This is not a very romantic sounding answer, but I get most of my ideas from whatever I’m working on at the moment. The motivation behind the cross shape came from looking at photos I had taken of some older work. And I’m looking at it on my phone of course, because that’s what we do. I’m like, “My God I’m doing this shape all the time.” I can’t recall the proper name for it, but it’s been used in quilting designs forever.  I first noticed them in a painting called “The Judy Blues”. I thought of the little crosses all together like they were a field of flowers. I continued with that flower vibe for a bit, but eventually they became more geometric. That’s when I started experimenting with the cross shaped canvases. My intention is to display a few of them together and hope for a big impact. In a way, it’s an exercise in restraint, to only paint with a few moves in each one but know that when they’re all together they’ll function as a whole. Sort of like, individually they’re sentences, but shown altogether you get a full paragraph. I’ve always loved that analogy. 

Amy: What do you do when times get tough in the studio – how do you recenter or rebound?

Allison: I have to keep showing up. Even if it’s just tidying up or drinking tea, sitting and looking, I have to have my body in this space. There’s really something sacred about my time here and it’s very different from the life that happens inside the house. I used to have a lot of guilt about experiencing lulls or if ideas weren’t churning. I don’t feel that way anymore, thank goodness. Brain breaks make me feel balanced and help the work in the long run. Sometimes what you need is to go for a walk. I’ll say, hustle culture was really popular when I was in undergrad and grad school. But once you’re out of school, who can sustain that? What artists do you know that don’t have outside responsibilities? You’ve got to live life in order to paint about it.

Amy: Do you have anything coming up you’d like to promote?

Allison: I’m in a pretty incredible show right now, actually. Part of it is happening in real life at clothing designer Paul Smith’s new gallery space, “Paul Smith Space”, located in his London flagship store. Another portion is available on the digital platform, Vortic. It’s curated by Catherine Loewe, a UK based curator and I’m humbled to be a part of it. It’s called “Fabric of Life” and includes all textile based work. You can view the digital exhibition here: https://vortic.art/exhibitions/fabric-of-life-curated-by-catherine-loewe-9787

This spring I’ll be in a group show in Chicago at Heaven Gallery with a few of my favorite people- Kate Sable, Lauren Rice and Rachel Klinghoffer. I’m pretty excited about it because I love Chicago and lived there for seven years before coming to the east coast. It still feels like home.

Amy:  Do you have any reading, music, tv, movie, culture recs?

Allison:  I’m very boring in these areas. I don’t listen to music in the studio because it convolutes my decision making process. I listen to public radio and to podcasts, but mostly it’s just to hear people talking. I grew up in a house where the TV was on all the time so now background noises feel soothing to me. I love having the TV on while not paying any attention to it. That being said, I just read Miranda July’s new one, “All Fours” which shook me.