Allison Cekala

Allison Cekala is an artist currently based in Boston, MA. She holds a BA from Bard College in Photography and Environmental Studies (2006) and an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University (2015). Primarily lens-based, her work is an investigation of nature; a documentation of the way in which humans move, shape, and transform their surroundings. She is the recipient of the Montague Travel Grant, the Karsh Award in Photography, and is currently a teaching fellow at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Road Salt: A 4500 Mile Journey, is currently on view at the Museum of Science, Boston (installation views below) and in the group show Empire of Dirt at the Paul Robeson Gallery at Rutgers University, Newark. Her work has been reviewed in the Boston Globe, WBUR’s Artery, among others.

Project Statement: Road Salt

Road Salt is a biography of a material. It is a record of extraction, migration, and physical transformation of Boston’s road salt, initiated by a vast and intricate choreography of human labor and global trade. From the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, the salt travels by boat 4500 miles through the Panama Canal and up the east coast of North America to Boston where it is spread throughout the city in winter months. Its implications are simultaneously ephemeral and long lasting—we use the salt once, then it melts out of our consciousness, but the salt continues its journey into the Atlantic Ocean—and beyond.

The ways in which humans move, shape, and transform their surroundings are complex and significant. This could be the story of any material. Road Salt asks us to consider where materials come from, what stories they tell, and how all is interconnected within the singular system that encompasses Earth.