University of Southern California
Fisher Museum
823 W Exposition Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90089
September 3 through December 7, 2013
Los Angeles based artist Alexandra Grant explores philosophical concepts of identity in her new text-based body of work titled Century of the Self. Century of the Self is comprised of vibrantly colored paintings, works on paper and a floor installation made from recycled waste. Grant’s heroic-scale artworks combined with a taste for poignant textual detail allows her to delve into questions of how we define who we are, who the Other is, and what the voices are that come to populate our unconscious while most profoundly shaping us. Inspired by Adam Curtis’ documentary of the same name, Grant’s Century of the Self is drawn from many sources including Sophocles’ Antigone, the writer Audre Lorde, seminal psychological texts by Freud and his followers, and cultural movements that probed the unconscious mind, from Surrealism to Feminism. In Century of the Self Grant does not claim to have found the Self, but maps—through collage, Rorschach patterns and textual quotation—what is a constant search.
photo credit: Brian Forrest
