PLACE:

Utica, MS

BIO:

Alexis McGrigg is a contemporary artist who examines themes of Blackness, space, spirituality, identity, and collective consciousness. Her artwork utilizes the mediums of painting, drawing, and interdisciplinary media to explore the multiplicity of Blackness through figurative abstraction and conceptual narratives. She integrates poetry, sound, and performance throughout her arts practice.

Her artwork is included in several private collections and has been featured in exhibitions across the U.S. and internationally in New York, NY, Chicago, IL, Miami, FL, New Orleans, LA, and Oakland, CA – most recently in her solo exhibitions In The Beloved at Almine Rech Gallery, Brussels, Belgium, The Labour of Being at Almine Rech Gallery, Paris, France, and The Ether – Journey In Between at Richard Beavers Gallery, NYC; group exhibitions, SAY IT LOUD at Christie’s Auction House, Salon de Peinture at Almine Rech, NY, and LIGHT at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (CICA) in South Korea.

PROJECT:

My proposed project, Alterity: Unknown Histories, is to produce a short film and installation centered around my family’s ancestral ties to Utica, MS, by way of Learned, Arcola, and Shaw, MS. The film will be a visual investigation of our bodies’ relation to the land and water, be it physically or through an energetic pull conveyed through movement, installation, the use of spatial and environmental sound, and experimental video. I’m interested in how relatives in my family, whom I’ve never had the opportunity to know, are still tied to me physically and spiritually through the land that surrounds us, and through the psychological trauma that has been passed down from generation to generation. Alterity is a reference to the notion of the “other” or alternate, alternate worlds, alternate histories, alternate realities. It is both an examination of how specific locations are like a tie to the earth for relatives passed, but also how those ancestral ties are mirrored within me.