Alex Younger

Lives and works in North Adams, MA, USA

Artist statement

My work begins and ends with language. My interdisciplinary, labor-intensive practice is rooted in the political power of words both institutional and populist. Using digital jacquard and hand weaving, printmaking, dye, and photography, I apply text as both content and composition. I examine the violent bureaucracy that underpins our cultural handling of sexual violence, using the inherent properties of my research, materials, and processes to achieve poetics through didacticism. Conceptually driven and materially specific, I match and merge processes and forms – complex multicloth structures, sections of floating warp, hand-dyeing techniques, stitchwork, and numerous printing methods – with cultural photographs and sourced texts to create unsettling declarative works. I am interested in how the content of an image, document, or statement is transformed when it is taken off of neutral paper. Using legal documents, press statements, and composed political declarations as primary source material and visual compositions, I strip the language of its artifice of impartiality. These pieces bear witness to traumatic histories, mediating the relation between the literal representation of the object and the pain they signify, but can only indirectly portray. Hiding, erasing, or fracturing text through the intervention of image, material, or audience, the pieces highlight the construction and fragility of the narratives we build. Delicate but flexible and moveable, my pieces are...

Artwork