Alexandra Giannell
Deep into Death: When Souls Collide (2019)
(collaboration with 20 incarcerated artists)
graphite on paper
72 x 60 in.
NFS
“Interweaving discussions of vision, perception, and identity, my work operates as expansive fields recording time, labor, and indexical mark-making within the language of abstraction. The use of haptic mark-making is a means to both embed the body as well as suggest its absence – there, not there.
This work particularly investigates the loss of connection to the physical body inevitable within displacement, imprisonment, and death, and is largely informed by my first-hand experience teaching and collaborating with incarcerated individuals in men’s prisons. The relationship between restriction and liberation is at play, incorporating a sense of recognizable prison structure and theoretical viewership of the panopticon, aiming to restrict and control the gaze. A sense of centrality aligns us with our body and allows for a sense of outward, external expansion and freedom with a reach toward the periphery. This work reminds us that while something is lost, if we go inward, we will be able to expand, open, and gain.”
© Alexandra Giannell