The Clay Studio offices, galleries, open studio, and school will be closed on Thursday, June 19, 2025, in honor of the Juneteenth Holiday.
Alex Ferrante
My artistic practice pivots around a central question, how has landscape, a representation of that which is exterior to ourselves, informed the creation of the human subject? By examining Western depictions of landscape, its parables and myths, I aim to dismantle and reimagine culturally inherited relationships between the outside world and the human body. My practice unfolds within the historical framework of the conscious self as subject, and the world beyond as object.
For me, the creative act is a method for contending with the many parts of oneself. While making, I am conversing with materiality, negotiating between material agency and identifiable representation. The use of historical references in my sculptures, coupled with the process of creating plaster molds, is a way of complicating authorship. My sculptures begin as an amalgamation of historical representations of landscape, a Greco-Roman sculpture of a satyr pouring wine, and objects at hand in the studio which become unified into a single material plane through the mold-making process. Much like a still life, the resulting compression of stamped material is the index of material play and an index of the evolution and complexity of the human subject in relation to culturally inherited objects.
My sculptures, enhanced by the evidence of their processes, focus on the experience of making as a form of thinking and revising. In a perpetual state of provisionality, the sculptures distort the expectation of finality. The work is an invitation to consider all that is exterior to ourselves as animate and living.
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your purchase supports the operations of The Clay Studio, a nonprofit that serves 35,000 people,
including 2,000 underserved school children, each year.
