Alex Anderson | Selected Works

Must Be Love, 2019

Earthenware, glaze, gold luster

19 x 17 x 3 inches

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. He is represented by Sargent’s Daughters.

Chaos, 2021

Earthenware, glaze, gold luster

22 x 18 x 2 inches

Love Spell I, 2020

Earthenware, glaze, gold luster

20.5 x 10 x 10 inches

What inspired you to pursue ceramics as your primary art-making medium? Has it been challenging to champion a medium so often confined to the realm of “craft”?

AA: Ceramic art presents the infinite possibilities offered by image-oriented media while offering the freedom to draw with physical form. There is an exciting immediacy to working with clay and the thrill of turning a formless mass into an object related to the human experience continues to draw me more deeply into the medium. Clay has been tied to human life forever and, as such, is part of human history and art history, even though the canon chooses to contextualize it as marginal and other. The craft/fine art distinction emerged when society felt it necessary to make a distinction between objects made for use and objects made to hold ideas. The most basic structural forces of social iniquity; sexism and racism, are core to this division. In the renaissance in Europe, only men were considered capable of making things that did not serve a purely functional use and as global society became more cosmopolitan, racial divisions also entered this structure.

So, while it can be challenging to work against the barriers applied to craft as a category, it is the same work I do as a person with my identity markers daily and my story aligns well with the larger story of craft’s ascendance in the west. With the source of the craft/fine art division in mind, I find the consideration of the division as valid to be highly provincial–a notion as unsophisticated as ignoring the larger contributions of women and people of color to art history extending far beyond craft.

Nightmare Vessel 3, 2018

Earthenware, glaze, gold luster

6.25 x 13 x 13 inches

Your work is incredibly multivalent, blending allusions to art and design history with contemporary pop cultural references. How do you achieve a balance between these influences and what does this combination offer you?

AA: I think of history and the present as being parts of a larger whole. People look at most things based on ideas they form around things they have already seen, so art history informs how people look at ceramics and my work, but that pairs with my own lived experience considering the imagery of contemporary life. In my work the balance between these two comes from my own understanding of how the past and present influences me and highlighting the things that I notice as being relevant today as part of the fleeting concept of contemporaneity.

You Wish You Could Escape, But You Love It, 2021

Earthenware, glaze, gold luster

24 x 20 x 4 inches

Snake Pit, 2018

Earthenware, glaze and gold luster

7.5 x 12 x 12 in

Poissoned, 2019

Earthenware, glaze, gold luster

18 x 12 x 10.5 inches

What new ideas and avenues are you excited to explore in your practice moving forward?

AA: I mostly want to focus on making the work larger in scale and complicating the relationships between sculpture and painting in my practice. 

 

Tell Your Boyfriend Not to Be Mad at Me, 2018

Earthenware, glaze, gold luster

11 x 11 x 14 inches

Martyr I, 2020

Earthenware, glaze, gold luster

22 x 18 x 2 inches