Alexandra Grant

I am a painter in my studio practice and most of my work there is based on collaborations or exchanges with writers but I also have a big practice outside of the studio when I started my career I think in every Young artist career you have to have very fixed ideas of what your practice is and they're actually quite rigid and then there comes a point where you have traveled that path and you've made it you know you've taken it to the nth degree but it no longer suits your purposes as a more mature artist I had something happen in my real life which was that I had bought an antique tombstone in the year 2000 right when I finished graduate school and I was driving from San Francisco to the East Coast and on this road trip back east I stopped in a small town in rural Wyoming where my aunt lived at the time and she had a friend who ran an antique store and we went in and she was looking at jewelry and all sorts of goofy stuff and I couldn't take my eyes off this Tombstone beautiful and perfect shape at the that point it was 120 years old I I purchased the stone drove it back to the east coast lived there for a year moved back to California had it home for a couple of years and then I had it in the studio and in 2000 I just really had a sense that it was time for me not to own the object anymore and I didn't know how to go about finding the Stone's home so I had the brilliant idea of listing it on eBay for way too much money or a prohibitive amount of money and and just putting it at the corner of Main and First in terms of the internet never dreaming that it would be found by an amateur genealogist who would then solve that it was from a homesteading cemetery not too far from here in Polk County that is the stone the name the story of a young baby who died in 1880. I had the choice I could FedEx the stone back or I could accompany it back and meet all the people who were directly connected to it and I decided to do something that outside of the studio and that blurred the line between the personal and the professional and the decision to bring a camera along was to do it in a way that wouldn't change the nature of the encounters I wanted to trace this series of exchanges which for each participant had a slightly different impetus but for me were about returning a stolen object trying to understand the story of what the object really was and and and also try to try and understand why it had meant so much to me through capturing the importance of it to different stakeholders it wasn't about having the best filmmaker or the best as you know all these things it really was about finding a process that kept in touch with the people whose voices I'm representing Ellie Kevorkian here from Bemis and you're making this as a painter would make it and that was such a gift because I realized yes I'm going to watch all the footage and then I'm gonna put stars by the bits that I think are brilliant and then I'm going to lay all of those out and then I'll continue to refine that so I've worked through four years of filming and in going through the archive I really see that it's the story itself that continues to connect people and whatever the project is at the end it has already been successful because it keeps drawing people together and it's so rare that objects get returned to their communities and in at a very small level we think of returning something but we don't think about what it means to receive something back

Channel: Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts

Views: 17,516

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Id: QKvilZAg0-I

Length: 4min 32sec (272 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 10 2023