Alexandra Grant at Honor Fraser

Alexandra Grant
A.D.D.G. (aux dehors de guillemets)
Honor Fraser
September 6, 2008
Alexandra Grant is known for large-scale paintings, delicate wire-form sculptures and installations that explore and blur the boundaries between images and text. “A.D.D.G. (aux dehors des guillemets)” is her first solo show at Honor Fraser. The show consists of seven approximately 12 foot paintings on paper, a large sculptural mobile and a group of videos in a projection room. The exhibition approaches her theme in a variety of ways expanding on her ideas explored 2007 at her MOCA focus exhibition. “A.D.D.G.” pushes the artists intent to paint “image systems” rather than images to do as Helene Cixous describes in The Last Painting or The Portrait of God:” to write like a painter.” Grant writes a painting then rewrites and redrafts leaving the show constantly in process.
Like the show at MOCA the paintings are ponderous in scale and content. Her pieces are made with a signature hand that operates almost as predictably as typeface. The artist achieves her uniformly awkward looking text by forcing herself to write in reverse. The connection between words is loosely organized by using literary sources in this case the hyper-text poet Michael Joyce composed six poems or sutras depicting the senses and the mind. The artist has lifted the text from the poems to use the words as intuitive marks giving the pieces a kind of maniacal synthesis of image and process. There is an element of endurance involved here, words pile up obscuring the surface rather than achieving some kind of intentional optical effect. In “Third Portal (ear) “ she seems to have stopped mid-letter and dropped the brush during a static moment. The large bold word/mark, “Hola” is partially red, blue and black. The battle between black and primary paint colors with in the form creates a haptic mud of mark and meaning.
The real break-out surprise is inventiveness of Grant’s video accompanying the paintings and sculpture. Meditative and formal the videos more fluidly than the paintings or sculpture to present the narration in a way that highlights the gravity of Joyce’s poetry. “Ladder ” based on Joyce’s poem of the same title follows the artist’s handwriting in neon climbing up the wall slowly. The after-image effects of the glowing neon, bend creating a kind of horizontal and vertical banding a lot like the physical structure of a ladder. The process of painting is much more intuitive than the process of editing a video. However, aesthetically the viewing of painting is a schematically prescribed process that invokes a heroic character at its center making and leaving marks and ultimately owning the relation between the viewer and the object. Grant seems to have reopened the process of painting in video in a highly inventive way allowing us into her process as collaborators.
A counterbalance to the delicacy of the video is the clunkiness of the sculpture, “A love that should have lasted (in memory of a Diasporist painter)”. The sculpture is heavy, black and appears to be made out of paper towel cores. Listed as paper mache the sculpture is based on a phrase within the First Portal (sight) and is linked to the scale of words in the Third Portal (touch). The title however seems more likely lifted from the Beatles song, “No One” than from Joyce’s poetry. It hangs heavily on its support and rather than feeling active and light like Grant’s mobile, “Nimbus” at MOCA it is more ominous and difficult to absorb.
There is a quality of self-abasement that tracks the hand of the artist through media in an indeterminate way. Using ephemeral paper materials and a discomfitted hand Grant’s pieces strike a balance between her opposed sensibilities, the clumsy and the poetic.