This collaborative artist's book is a work of fiction set in a Kafkaesque world where creativity is a criminal offence and artists are imprisonned. Alexandra Grant's text, the testimony of the prison's warden, is powerfully illustrated by Eve Wood's drawings.
The Artists' Prison looks askance at the workings of personality and privilege,
sexuality, authority, and artifice in the art world. Imagined through the heavily redacted testimony of the prison's warden, written by Alexandra Grant, and powerfully allusive images by Eve Wood, the prison is a brutal, Kafkaesque landscape where creativity can be a criminal offence and sentences range from the allegorical to the downright absurd. In
The Artists' Prison, the act of creating becomes a strangely erotic condemnation, as well as a means of punishment and transformation. It is in these very transformations—sometimes dubious, sometimes oddly sentimental—that the book's critical edge is sharpest. In structural terms,
The Artists' Prison represents a unique visual and literary intersection, in which Wood's drawings open spaces of potential meaning in Grant's text, and the text, in turn, acts as a framework in which the images can resonate and intensify in significance.
Published following the eponymous exhibition at Ochi Projects, Los Angeles, from June 3 to July 2, 2017.
Alexandra Grant (born 1973 in Fairview Park, Ohio, lives and works in Los Angeles) is a contemporary mixed media artist whose body of work includes painting, sculpture, photography, installation, video, and publishing. Her art is characterized by an interdisciplinary fascination with language as image, particularly in embodying the written word. Described a s a "writer who writes with materials" and "a radical collaborator," Grant engages with the work of writers, poets, philosophers and linguists including Sophocles, Wisława Szymborska, Michael Joyce,
Hélène Cixous, and
Keanu Reeves. Grant has exhibited in museums and galleries around the world, and her works are in museum collections such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, and others. Grant co-founded, with Keanu Reeves,
X Artists' Books and runs the grantLOVE project, which supports artists and arts education through the sale of art editions.
Eve Wood is an American visual artist, poet, and critic whose drawings and paintings have been exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries such as Susanne Vielmetter, Western Project, and Ochi Projects.
