source: alexandersmall

Biography

Born in the UK, Alexander studied art and philosophy in Bristol and has been a practicing artist for the past seven years recently completing his MA at Camberwell College of Art London. He has regularly exhibited around the UK, Europe, and North America and travelled to India researching traditional art forms. He has been a resident artist, trustee and volunteer at the Artist Sanctuary in Northampton and a member of the Northampton Arts Collective volunteering at the Fishmarket Gallery. He received the Juliet Gompert’s Trust Award in 2010, was selected for the Future Map 11 exhibition at the Zabludowicz Collection and has completed an AIR mini residency at Archway London. Other projects include a collaborative practice ‘Art ] iculating History’ placing art concepts in historical contexts and Gallery S6X a contemporary art space and online gallery both with Jonathan Alibone.

Statement

My work occupies the space between ideas of the Dionysian and the Absurd, moving from one to the other exploring themes of futility, pointlessness, hopelessness, nuisance, de individuation, death, rebirth and the irrational.

This activity becomes a strategy for affirming life in the hope of building links between individuals by examining and questioning moments of extremity and stagnation experienced in the everyday. Remnants of events that could be termed dionysian are represented, located, exposed and injected into its opposite. The dionysian becomes the counter subversion to the inert false economies of the apollonian and it is hoped that this dialogue will reinvigorate, create new meaning and affirm life.

Working with a range of media systems including drawing, installation, sculpture, sound and video these ideas are examined through a gentle kind of system mocking, where the system is form such as image, object, machine or event the dionysian manifests in some way as disorder, noise, glitch, corruption, dis function, dissipation, fragmentation, displacement disintegration or de individuation. This process on many levels could be termed as tragic giving birth to the next dialogue of meaning and through this change or end a new beginning is born.

Education
Camberwell College of Arts, London
University of the West of England, Bristol
University of Northampton