Allison Gretchko

About

Allison Gretchko (b.1995, Chicago) is a photographer and writer whose artistic practice focuses on the interconnectedness of people and place through habitual and temporal representations. Focusing in on artifacts, inheritances, personal archives, and memory to explore threads connected to care and consumption in intimate and domestic settings. Her work examines the ideology of factual fluidity in relation to the photographic image, and the duality that shares with human memory across space and time. She seeks to uncover intimate relationships and habits that exist both physically and psychologically in site-specific locations in order to bring the private sphere into the public gaze.

Relying heavily on psychogeography and intuition to direct her movement, she embraces the nuances that analogue photography provides to the unpredictability of the environment. Natural sunlight is her methodological tool to uncover and dissect the hidden ecosystems that interconnect people and places. She documents what the sun chooses to fall upon, capturing the beams of light as its own figure acting as an embodiment of space, movement, and memory. Examining the inherited ecosystems that connect collective experiences to private environments through the ephemerality of material and objects, her work touches on both the spatial and temporal.

Photographs, similar to memories, never tell the complete story. Her work operates within this friction, inviting the viewer to decipher the innate intimacy and storytelling for themselves. She asks us to confront the consequences of intimacy made open to the public gaze. 

She currently resides in London, having completed a MFA in Arts & Humanities (2024) and an MA in Photography (2023) from the Royal College of Art, after working for nearly a decade as an in-house commercial photographer in the United States.

Who drinks your tears?

Exploring notions of collective memory and cyclical return through autofictious photographs of a generational family home, Who drinks your tears?, seeks to draw viewers into a haunting of light and life. Postulating scenes of domesticity as ecosystems for familial formation, tactile memory, and materiality to question the archive of inheritance in physical and psychological terms. The photographs invite the viewer into motions and memorials of past and present using light as an embodiment of the home to highlight collective experiences found in private spheres. An immersion into the domestic, the work seeks to attend to the maintenance of familial identity, generational memory, and the haunting traces of the past.

Instagram: @gretchko_photo                          

Website: www.gretchko.com

Email: acg628@gmail.com