Keanu Reeves’ girlfriend Alexandra Grant may be famous in the entertainment industry due to the fame of her boyfriend. However, in the art circles, she is a well-known face and needs no introduction. She is a visual artist dabbling in mixed media, paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints, clothing, and more. She has been teaching since 2009 and has also tried her hand at documentary direction (Taking Lena Home). She is the founder of ‘Love House’ and co-founder of ‘X Artists’ Books.’ (XAB)
Alexandra Grant Artist Style
Grant is an avid reader. She manufactures popular and niche texts into paintings, sculptures, videos, and more, imbibing them with her unique nuances and perspective. Deeply influenced by literature, she poses the question of identity, translation, and loss during translation. Her work perplexes the audience and interrogates them over the use of cultural signifiers and their varied images arising from varied languages.
‘Ladder Quartet’ Series
Alexandra Grant has collaborated with several artists over the years. For her ‘Ladder Quartet’ series, she joined arms with Michael Joyce, the pioneer of hypertext fiction. The collection features large-scale paintings which evoke the image of a ladder. The paintings incorporate the texts curated by Joyce. The artwork is named after the eponymous poems of Joyce – ‘conspirar’ (conspire), ‘she taking the space of’ (he taking the space of), and ‘let’s’ (ladders).
For the painting, she translated Joyce’s poetry into Spanish and connected them in a nonlinear fashion. The only common string – the poetic elements and the figures of speech – alliterations, refrains, metaphors. Using these chosen words, she visualized them into a system, a ladder so to speak, allocating a particular and interconnected meaning to them.
The Six Portals
For her next show, she envisioned a sensory blast through language. Thus, she created a collection of six paintings, one for each sensory node. They served as a window for one’s assimilation into the senses. Each painting is distinct in shape and colour. For example, the ‘First Portal (mind)’ uses the imagery of grey splitting into colours to signify the composition of the abstract and the erratic shower of new ideas that arise from it. For the ‘Third Portal (ear)’, she uses curved lines and embeds them with words kept in perspective to manufacture the sound’s intensity.
Century of the Self
The ‘Century of the Self’ is a multifaceted collection entailing paintings, sculptures, videos, photographs, a clothing line, and more. This oeuvre deals with the construct of identity, reflection, and the shifting of identity which results in mostly gendered power dynamics. It takes assistance from psychological texts and marketing of consumer-centric goods & services. She references classic texts (Shakespeare’s Hamlet) and contemporary songs (I see myself in you).
While the paintings in the collection are mixed media on paper, fabric and canvas, it includes one contemporary sculpture akin to the neon signs. The sign is installed in the corner with two mirrors lining either side of the walls. The sign is half of a double text which reads ‘ I see myself in you’. The viewer is urged to look around and see Alexandra Grant’s incantation superimposed onto themselves.
Photo Courtesy – Lowell Ryan Projects
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