Alexander Iverson

Memory

The development of my art at Montserrat has been something unpredictable to me. I came into this school from a state school with mostly drawing and painting under me. My medium has changed completely, from charcoal and paint to almost purely digital with ink incorporated on occasion. In my opinion, digital work looks considerably more refined by nature, pixels being a neater medium than charcoal. I’m inspired by the apparent mundane. If somebody looks at my work and asks “Why?” or “This is boring” or “This doesn’t mean anything” I feel like I have done my job properly.

Outside of current schoolwork, I am in the process of gathering data and materials for a series of small books. I’d like to finish the series with at least 4 books, all having to do with memories that mean nothing and hold no significant impact. What cigarette butts I pass in any given day, what I talked about and when, and data sets of my every day. The inspiration for this came from the artist Ed Ruscha, primarily his artist book Various Small Fires and Milk which was literally a small book with images of fires and glasses of milk. The actual process of designing books are related to things I have done before but this subject matter is entirely new to me. My relationship with this process has been a little strained.

I’ve made books in the past and these were usually made out of necessity with content that I needed to put in them and usually bound accordion style. This time, I’m binding these books perfect bound or stitched and I’m making these because I want to. The focus on memory for me is important because I’ve always been fascinated with it and what makes a memory important and how people can remember incorrectly or remember something so vividly that never actually happened.

I’ve learned, since coming to Montserrat, that my work is moderately minimalist and created out of necessity and commission. I’m going to use this knowledge of myself to fight back against this and try to make more complex and diverse pieces as well as creating because I want to. Overcoming your own aesthetic is very difficult for anybody to do and I plan on scrapping many layouts and designs before I come to something that will satisfy me.