Welcome Alex Boeschenstein (RAiR 2023)

Alex Boeschenstein in his RAiR studio.

The Tourist (Installation View), 2022, 3-Channel Video Projection, Dimension Variable, Duration: 09:04

Boundary Markers, 2022, Installation, Materials: Pine, MDF, Steel, 3d Prints, Chalkboard Paint, Chalk, CT Scans of Fossils, Dimensions Variable; Largest obelisk: 4” x 72” x 1.5”

This is the water, this is the well. Drink Full (diptych), 2022, Intaglio Drypoint Laser Engraving, 32” x 20”.

Refillable accessories for bottomless ascent into grand memory lapse (detail), 2021, Installation, Materials: Sulfur, Himalayan Sea Salt, Steel, MDF, Pine, Chalkboard Paint, Chalk. Dimensions Variable.

Alex Boeschenstein, born 1988 in Cleveland, Ohio is an interdisciplinary artist. He received a BA in Interdisciplinary Visual Art at the University of Washington in 2015 and an MFA in Transmedia and Print at the University of Texas in 2022. Recent solo exhibitions include Fields of Irisarri at Shoreline Community College, Shoreline, WA and Too Many Cunning Passages at Glass Box Gallery in Seattle, WA. He has exhibited work nationally at the Visual Arts Center in Austin, Texas and King Street Station in Seattle, WA, amongst others.

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I am an interdisciplinary artist working across a broad range of media, including drawing, sculpture, printmaking, video, and installation.

My subject is history, how it haunts the present, and how it failed the future. Invariably, I return to the human dilemma of being too obtuse and shortsighted to solve the problems bred by being too smart for our own good—instances of ingenuity and haplessness working in lockstep harmony. I use the frameworks of weird fiction, gothic marxism, parapolitics, and geoscience as tools to point to the undersides of spectacular society.

In each project, I address a different set of concerns, themes, and research avenues—usually influenced by my regional context and place—by balancing spiraling excursions into archives and historical documents with fieldwork, on-site exploration, material salvage, and studio experimentation. Over the last decade, I have developed a method of “artistic prospecting,” which deviates from colonial models by turning the analytical focus towards mechanisms of power and by blending the terms of reality and fiction to draw out traces of intelligibility from forces resistant to sight and scrutiny. By fostering conspiratorial pattern misrecognitions, paranoid fantasies, and speculative fictions, I attempt to reconcile the gap between, on the one hand, the phenomenological experience of the individual caught in small enclaves of the social world and, on the other, the totalizing structures of capital to which we are subject yet cannot fully conceptualize.

www.alex-boeschenstein.com