ALEX ANDERSON

(b. 1990, Seattle, WA) uses the delicate medium of ceramics as his main vehicle to explore the intersections of the sublime experiences that make up both the man-made and natural worlds, as well as deeper, more complicated issues of race and cultural representation. His artworks combine a dexterity in the medium with a confluence of baroque imagery and compositions, Japanese pop art references, and current contemporary fashion and design trends in order to probe the depths of reality, illusion and identity.

At the core of Anderson’s practice is a philosophical, existential examination of identity politics relative to his respective backgrounds. By channeling methodologies surrounding artistic production in ceramic arts, Anderson creates fantastic, multifaceted sculptures; synchronously subversive and whimsical. He uses the classical aesthetics of a Western art canon—one ironically sharing space with queer and camp aesthetics—to translate the structures governing his lived experience in society, along with social perceptions of non-Western identity and form. Anderson’s work engages with Western ceramic histories, yet operates, too, at the core of Post-Blackness.

This method of production directly corresponds with current aesthetic and artistic practices and ideologies surrounding theories of Post-Black art. Working at the intersection of identity politics and aesthetic empowerment, Anderson’s ceramic creations appear charming and playful – yet their frivolity is only glaze-deep. They contain layered conceptions about blackness, masculinity, and perception, folded and fused together, reciprocating the merging of the artist’s lived experience, historical inheritance, and conscious self-awareness.

Criticality, political derision, and gender politics are all relevant schemas for Anderson’s sculptural oeuvre. Each of his identities has a history of marginalization, received violence, and fetishization. His work gives form to the realities, stereotypes, and cultural perceptions of divergent cultural identities, and, as a group, give rise to complex aporic spaces. Anderson seeks to create a metaphorical world of objects—those that distill his understanding of what it means, and how it feels, to live through intersectional identities, and his resultative place in the contemporary social world.

Anderson received his Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art and Chinese from Swarthmore College and his Master of Fine Arts in Ceramics from the University of California, Los Angeles. Anderson previously studied at the Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute in Jingdezhen, China and was awarded a Fulbright Grant in affiliation with the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, where he continued his studies in ceramic art. His work has been exhibited internationally, and across the United States, including at Human Resources (Los Angeles, CA), The Long Beach Museum of Art (Long Beach, CA), the American Museum of Ceramic Art (Pomona, CA), Deli Gallery (New York, NY), Gavlak Gallery (Los Angeles, CA; Palm Beach, FL), and Jeffery Deitch Gallery (New York, NY), amongst others. His work has been reviewed by Artsy, Artforum, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, Cultured, the Los Angeles Times, amongst others.