ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Alex Alexander is a Washington DC native, born February 14th 1988. After graduating from the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, Alexander received her Bachelors in Fine Art Photography from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2010. She currently resides in Baltimore living as a full-time visual and performance artist.
Though the visual arts have always been a thriving focus for Alex Alexander, her heart has forever belonged to poetry in all of its forms. As an alumna of the Brave New Voices/ DC slam team (2004-07) Alexander has transformed her love of performance poetry into a Baltimore-based venue that she calls, The Bolton Hill Open Mic Series. It is a stylishly orchestrated, monthly performance showcase of notable local talents that takes place every third Friday of the month in the Bolton Hill neighborhood of downtown Baltimore.
Today, with more than a decade of exploration in the arts, Alex Alexander continues to broaden her visual horizons by combining her first love of the literary arts with the medium of fine-art photography. This accompanied by a particular focus on portraiture, with an exquisite eye for composition and striking subject matter all accumulates to what she calls "photo-poetics". Upon graduating from MICA Alex completed two visual triumphs entitled "The Awakenings" and "Nudes of the Awakenings"; fine art catalogues where poetry and photography collide.
In these collections of work, she brings to the forefront matters of sexuality, racial sensitivities, emotional loss and gain and visual stories of ones defiance against the odds. Her art does not shy away from truth. It revels in existentialist overtones not burdened by some overwhelming need to be safe or gentle with its viewer. Alexander's rawness comes not only from an innate desire to push and bend the realms of visual thinking but from a physical depletion of vision that occurred at birth. Alex Alexander was born with only partial sight, causing her to depend majorly upon the distinction between extreme lights and darks. It is in the contrast where she finds the greater picture which is evident in her style of rendering.
Though Alex battles daily with partial sight, she has never limited her expressions to only one canvas. This ongoing story of one woman's journey through life can be summed up in several mediums. While her visual triumphs echo off walls, her lyrical compositions grace stages and speakers throughout the DMV. Her latest body of work entitled "Perfect Vision" is a recorded collection of vocal work paired with heavy hitting spoken word poetry and outstanding musical accompaniment. This album is the artists first solo spoken word project and is a testament to her strength and unyielding versatility in the arts.
In more recent years, the artist has developed a major focus on lifestyle photography and other content associated with the art of depicting everyday life in both raw and aesthetically pleasing approaches. The work is somewhat documentary, leaning towards photojournalism and is centered primarily on life from the vantage point of a queer, black, femme in her early thirties. Each capture is accompanied by writings that echo back to the artists strong literary background. The subject matter is expertly composed glimpses of life at its most profound and most mundane.