Лучшие книги Александры Грант

Ode to Happiness is a grown-ups picture book, a charming reminder not to take oneself too seriously. With drawings by painter Alexandra Grant, text by actor Keanu Reeves, and in collaboration with mutual friend Janey Bergam, this facsimile artists book is about making the best of a bad situation. In the tradition of a classic hurtin song, Reeves text externalizes a melancholy internal monologue and subtly pokes fun at it. Grants images, delicately realised in sombre inky washes, reflect the dark and light, the pathos and humour of the text. Neither entirely earnest nor wholly ironic, Ode to Happiness is both a meditation and a gentle tease about how we cope with lifes sorrows. Los Angeles based artist Alexandra Grant uses language and words as the basis for her paintings, drawings and sculptures. Grant has exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, and the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore. She has collaborated with artists and writers including Michael Joyce and Helene Cixous, and is a founding member of the Watts House Project in Los Angeles. Keanu Reeves, born in 1964 in Beirut, is a celebrated actor and writer. Reeves films include Point Break (1991), Speed (1994), The Matrix (1999) and the upcoming Jekyll (2011). His theatrical roles include an acclaimed portrayal of Shakespeares Hamlet.

The Artists' Prison looks askance at the workings of personality and privilege, sexuality, authority, and artifice in the art world. Imagined through the heavily redacted testimony of the prison's warden, written by Alexandra Grant, and powerfully allusive images by Eve Wood, the prison is a brutal, Kafkaesque landscape where creativity can be a criminal offence and sentences range from the allegorical to the downright absurd. In The Artists' Prison, the act of creating becomes a strangely erotic condemnation, as well as a means of punishment and transformation. It is in these very transformations--sometimes dubious, sometimes oddly sentimental--that the book's critical edge is sharpest. In structural terms, The Artists' Prison represents a unique visual and literary intersection, in which Wood's drawings open spaces of potential meaning in Grant's text, and the text, in turn, acts as a framework in which the images can resonate and intensify in significance.

About the Author
Alexandra Grant is a Los Angeles–based artist who uses language, literature, and exchanges with writers as the basis for her work in painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography.

Eve Wood is a visual artist, poet, and critic whose drawings and paintings have been exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries such as Susanne Vielmetter, Western Project, and Ochi Projects.

What exactly is a shadow? Is it light tracing an object or the shape a body throws when it comes between a light source and a surface? Is it a metaphor for the intimate, darker side of a person's nature-as Carl Jung postulated-and the unconscious side of one's self, where daemons and secrets are kept hidden or repressed? Is it an allegorical place between darkness and light, death and living? Or is it a state of illusion, like Plato's cave? Is it a verb that means to follow or accompany, or even to spy on? Shadows, a new collaborative series by Alexandra Grant and Keanu Reeves, explores the real and symbolic nature of the shadow as image and figure of speech. Grant's photographs capture Reeves's shadow at times as a silhouette and at others as traces of light as he and the camera move together. In transforming the images into color and reversing light for dark, Grant has made the shadows themselves the source of light. Reeves's texts, written in tandem with the creation of the images, give voice to the multiple manifestations of the shadow: as a projected figure, a place of concealed emotion and an invocation to shadow play.