Contributor

Alison S. M. Kobayashi is an artist working in video, performance, installation, and drawing. She was born in Mississauga, where she received a BA from the University of Toronto. She now lives in Brooklyn where she is the Special Projects Director at UnionDocs, a Center for Documentary Art. In her work, Kobayashi performs a variety of characters that are both studiously and playfully rendered. These personas are inspired by Kobayashi’s extensive collection of lost, discarded, and donated objects, ranging from answering machine tapes purchased at a secondhand shop, to a love letter left on a sidewalk. Through repeated interaction with the objects (listening, transcribing, re-enacting, playing), narratives and imagery begin to manifest themselves and inspire performances, videos, installations, and drawings. The results are humorous, low-fi artifacts of an artist embodying the lives of others. Kobayashi’s short videos have been exhibited and screened widely in Canada, the United States, and overseas. She was a guest artist at the 2008 Flaherty Film Seminar, and her body of work was a Spotlight Presentation at Video Out, Jakarta International Film Festival, Indonesia. In 2012, she was commissioned by Les Subsistances in Lyon, France, to produce her first live performance, Defense Mechanism. She is currently developing her second live performance.