Allison Hrabluik’s video work The Splits, intersects documentary and fiction through a series of performances that demonstrate the skills of disparate talents, ranging from tap dancers, gymnasts, skippers, and other everyday artists of the bodily gesture. Performed on the stage of a community centre, the acts are now recontextualized by their presentation as a video installation in the gallery space. The culmination of a community centre’s stage, crisp audio and the close cropping, become devices that connect what might otherwise be a random grouping of people, isolating and highlighting their actions. The result is a form of abstract storytelling in which a generalized survey of practiced human movement reveals a narrative of characters, “giving way to a carnivalesque collectivity, competitive eating and hula hooping become interchangeable expressions of humanity."

The cast includes real-life performers whose skills range from the mundane to the extraordinary: a singer, a pizza dough thrower, speed skippers and dog trainers. Scissors clip, a rope whirs, the sound of a mouth harp interrupts an operatic scream.

Allison Hrabluik comes to filmmaking from the visual arts, where she has worked as experimental filmmaker for the past twenty years, exhibiting in solo and group exhibitions and film festivals internationally. Her work includes video, animation, drawing and installation, often to humorous or absurdist ends. With a recent focus on collaboration with actors and musicians, Hrabluik’s work has revealed characters through various narrative processes: so-called documentary objectivity, the messy subjectivity of first-person narration, allegorical third-person perspective, and the generative ambiguity of abstraction. She is currently in post-production on her first feature film, Hanne on The High Sea, an unusual coming of age story based on the novel The Widows, by Giller Prize winning author Suzette Mayr.

Allison received her BFA from The Alberta College of Art & Design and is a laureate of the two-year HISK post graduate program in Ghent, Belgium. She is an Assistant Professor at  Emily Carr University of Art and Design.