Art on Campus - Alexandra Grant
CAPS SMALL ART COLLECTION
ALEXANDRA GRANT
Nimbito, 2014
Alexandra Grant
Pencil on Paper
43 x 43 inches
Courtesy of Ochi Gallery
Location: Liberal Arts Building, South Stairs
An artist with a profound investment in the graphical qualities of language, Alexandra Grant's works explore the use of text and language in various media - painting, drawing, sculpture, film, and photography – generally probing ideas of translation, identity, dis/location, and social responsibility. Grant frequently collaborates with other artists, writers, and philosophers, often going so far as to have specific texts written as the impetus to her intricate paintings and sculptures. She has collaborated with author Michael Joyce, actor Keanu Reeves, artist Channing Hansen, and the philosopher Hélène Cixous, amongst others. Having spent significant portions of her childhood and adolescence living in Mexico, France, and Spain, some of the basic questions that fuel her practice are: How do the languages we speak and the images we see form how we think and exchange ideas? How can artists and writers work to create and influence culture in an increasingly technology-driven world? Inspired by a short text written by the hypertext fiction pioneer Michael Joyce, Nimbus, Grant's Nimbo/Nimbito series purposely resemble the amorphous forms of nimbus clouds. Eschewing the linear pathway of standard written text, Grant employs comic-book style speech bubbles to isolate each individual word and fragment it from its spatial relationships of meaning. Filtered through her own tri-lingual experience and inverted as if seen through da Vinci's mirror, she constructs her own poetic playlist, a visual archive that is paradoxically accumulative and anemic. Phrases from the poetry of Pablo Neruda and Wislawa Szymborska are also absorbed into many of the "nimbus" drawings - showing how by nature language both proliferates and is absorbed, is at once viral and parasitic.
Alexandra Grant holds a BA in History and Studio Art from Swarthmore College and a MFA in Drawing and Painting from the California College of Arts and Crafts. Grant has exhibited widely at galleries including Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Galerie Lelong, New York City; Galerie Gradiva, Paris; and Harris Lieberman Gallery, New York City; and at institutions such as Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, CA; The Broad Museum at Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI; the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore,MD; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA. Her work has been written about in the Los Angeles Times, White Hot Magazine, Frieze, Art in America, and Artforum amongst others. Awards include the COLA Individual Artist Fellowship and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Her works are included in museum collections such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada. Grant is the creator of the grantLOVE project, which has raised funds for arts-based non-profits including; Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA), Project Angel Food, Art of Elysium, 18th Street Arts Center, and LAXART. In 2017, Grant cofounded X Artists’ Books, a publishing house for artist-centered books. Publications have included collaborations with Diane di Prima, George Herms, and Eve Wood, among others, and are available online and in bookstores throughout Los Angeles, New York, and Paris.
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