Alex Klein
'Untitled' 2011
8 x 10 inches, Risograph print in archival sleeve
Edition of 8 + 2APs
Price: $100
The artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay once wrote, "There is a difference between a poem which is 'about' a thing and a poem which is a thing—its own thing, but not necessarily without reference to something else." I am interested in how the difference that Finlay describes here with respect to poetry translates in the realm of image production. That is, how an image of a thing can in turn become "its own thing." This of course can take place in a "concrete" way, through material processes of one kind or another. These formal procedures satisfy our basic desire to bring images into the world —to touch, objectify, and make what we see become physical. In some instances this is a means unto itself, but perhaps this transfiguration is also possible through a kind of diagramming. On the one hand a diagram, as it exists on a surface, can tell us how to "read" a picture, but it can just as easily operate as an interruption, a contour, a cut, or an arrow, pointing us elsewhere.
Alex Klein is an artist working between Los Angeles and Philadelphia, where she is Program Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Her work has recently been included in exhibitions at Clifton Benevento (New York), Cherry and Martin (Los Angeles), Las Cienegas Projects (Los Angeles), and Galerie Crone (Berlin), and her writing has appeared in publications including the journal Dot Dot Dot, Foam Magazine, and the exhibition catalogueHow Soon is Now? (Luma, 2012). She is a co-founder of the independent publishing imprint Oslo Editions and edited the critical volume on photography Words Without Pictures (LACMA / Aperture, 2010). She received her MFA from UCLA, her MA in the History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and her BA from Columbia University.