Michelle Alexander is a Canadian-born artist dwelling and dealing between Montreal and Chicago. She holds a Bachelor of Advantageous Arts from the College of Miami, an Affiliate’s diploma in Utilized Science from Parsons Faculty of Design, and a Grasp of Advantageous Arts from the Faculty of the Artwork Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited at establishments together with the Design Museum of Chicago, Mana Up to date Chicago, The Present (Stowe, VT), and galleries at each the College of Miami and SAIC.
Working throughout picture and materials, Alexander explores the physique’s response to inner rigidity, inspecting themes of id, self-perception, and the complexities of inhabiting one’s personal pores and skin. Her apply centres on course of — melting, manipulating, and destabilising supplies — to make seen what is commonly unseen, creating areas that confront discomfort whereas inviting viewers to recognise themselves inside a shared expertise.
Her current sculpture, The Mom. The Sister. The Strain exemplifies this strategy: a skin-like torso constructed from material and glue, cinched with staples and layered with delicate tulle impressed by familial wedding ceremony clothes. Each fragile and constricted, the work displays the emotional weight of inherited expectations round womanhood, marriage, and id. The Strain was the centrepiece of her curated exhibition Connective Thread, which introduced collectively six girls artists to discover the tensions between fragility and resilience inside collective feminine expertise.
You studied style design at Parsons earlier than happening to do your MFA. How a lot does that coaching nonetheless dwell within the work?
It’s nonetheless very current. Trend taught me how clothes form the physique and the way a lot strain lives inside one thing that’s meant to look easy. It additionally confirmed me how clothes can each conceal and intensify the physique. That rigidity between hiding and highlighting the physique has stayed with me.
Trend additionally trains you to suppose by way of seams, rigidity, construction, and the way material quietly directs posture and motion. It could prohibit the physique whereas altering how it’s perceived. That mind-set in regards to the physique by no means left me.
In my sculptures, clothes change into stand-ins for the physique itself. I stretch them, pin them, harden them, or allow them to collapse. They carry the reminiscence of being worn and the strain that comes with it.
Did you all the time work in three dimensions, or did you come to sculpture from some other place?
I really began in images, portray, and drawing. Over time, these media started to really feel too distant from my physique. I wished the work to exist bodily in house, to have weight and rigidity.
Sculpture allowed me to work extra instantly with supplies that had already lived alongside a physique. As soon as I started constructing with supplies, it felt a lot nearer to how I believe and expertise the world. Having one thing bodily current in house additionally creates a type of confrontation or reckoning. The viewer can’t simply look previous it. They should encounter it with their very own physique.
There’s one thing very bodily about how you’re employed: stapling, cinching, melting. What does that depth give the work {that a} extra managed course of wouldn’t?
Physicality is vital as a result of the work is about strain and endurance. The method mirrors that. I’m pulling, binding, and stretching supplies till they both maintain or fail.
The work is deeply knowledgeable by its bodily course of and transformation. It isn’t efficiency, however the act of constructing is performative in its personal means. There’s a switch of strain from my physique to work.
If the method had been too managed, the work would lose that rigidity. I would like the supplies to point out pressure. These moments are vital to me as a result of they expose the boundaries of management. The fabric begins to talk again, and the work begins to hold the strain it was constructed below.
How are you aware when a chunk is completed?
Often, when the piece reaches some extent the place it feels prefer it’s holding one thing emotionally. I’m in search of a stability the place the work feels tense however secure sufficient to exist.
Usually, that second comes when the fabric stops resisting me and begins talking again. When the shape begins to really feel like a physique reasonably than an object, I do know it’s shut.
It’s additionally a technique of letting go of conventional concepts of magnificence and pushing previous my very own consolation zone. Typically the work solely feels completed as soon as I’ve allowed it to change into one thing much less managed or much less polished than I initially meant.
The costume in The Strain carries parts of your mom’s wedding ceremony and your sister’s wedding ceremony. Did making the work change how you are feeling about these occasions, or about your individual relationship to that ritual?
It made me realise how layered these objects are. A marriage costume carries plenty of expectations about love, household, and what life ought to appear like. It additionally carries plenty of strain round look, the expectation that on that day, you embody a flawless model of your self and carry out a type of idealised perfection.
Working with these references allowed me to carry each the tenderness of these reminiscences and the strain that sits alongside them. The piece isn’t rejecting these rituals, however it does acknowledge how heavy they’ll really feel. In some ways, it displays the identical pressures I discover all through my work, the quiet weight positioned on our bodies to carry out a perfect.
Your bio states you “stay caught with the friction of what occurred,” which means the paintings doesn’t resolve issues. Is that irritating, or is staying caught the purpose?
I don’t suppose the work is supposed to resolve something. If something, it holds the second the place issues stay unresolved.
Staying with that friction feels trustworthy to me. The physique doesn’t neatly course of strain or reminiscence. Typically it simply carries it. You possibly can perceive one thing emotionally and even transfer by means of it, however that doesn’t imply the physique processes it on the similar price, and even processes it in any respect.
What you’ve been by means of stays with you in some kind. The strain doesn’t simply disappear. The sculptures mirror that. They sit in that rigidity reasonably than providing closure.
What made you need to curate Connective Thread, reasonably than simply take part in it?
Curating it really got here out of the truth that if I hadn’t organised it, the exhibition wouldn’t have existed. I developed the idea, pitched it to the gallery, and reached out to the artists who in the end participated within the present.
Curating it allowed me to suppose extra deliberately about how completely different practices communicate to one another. I’m concerned with how artists carry private histories and the way these experiences floor by means of materials.
Connective Thread introduced collectively artists who had been every coping with the physique, id, or reminiscence in numerous methods. Seeing these works in dialog created a type of collective language that felt bigger than anyone piece.
Are there any artists whose work you retain coming again to?
I typically return to artists who deal with the physique as one thing each weak and highly effective. Joan Semmel is somebody whose work I typically take into consideration. In lots of her work, she leaves her head outdoors the body, so the viewer sees the physique from her perspective reasonably than as an object. That shift permits the viewer to inhabit the physique reasonably than observe it from a distance.
I additionally return to Felix Gonzalez-Torres for the quiet energy of his work. The best way viewers bodily have interaction along with his items and change into a part of the work is extremely transferring to me.
Each artists strategy the physique in very alternative ways, however they share a sensitivity to how a viewer bodily and emotionally encounters the work.
