Statement
My work imagines the dinner table, its landscapes and narratives, as vessels containing misperceived, displaced, and eternal objects. The act of touch stems from the desire to be attentive to these objects. Touch enacts subjectivity. Touch is the exploration of how we relate to common objects, materials, and the world at large. That is to say, touch explores relations between self and other. On its surface, the dinner table is a stage where objects enter and leave. Its topology is always in motion and is in opposition to the stillness of the table as an object. In a larger sense, this tension embedded in the dinner table extends to the reality of momentary experience in a lasting world. My practice investigates my compulsion for permanence, where everyday objects are containers, holding passing thoughts, moments, and desires.
Objects have the power to govern and transform perspective. The objects I make are closely associated with rhopography. Rhopography is the depiction of things which lack importance, are overlooked and yet are necessary. My interest in these objects lies in their foundational presence in our everyday experience. Much like a monument, everyday objects become enduring armatures, describing our presence, documenting our experience and defining ways in which we will be remembered.
By hand making objects out of clay, the act of repetitive sculpting is my desire to retain clay's malleability, an act of suspending time. The liquidity of glaze becomes a weathering and reclaiming of vibrancy. The objects in my work are in a state of recollected beauty, between familiar and unfamiliar, rigorously cared for and fading into a present imperceptibility.
Bio
Alex Ferrante was born in Dallas, Texas, and grew up in rural northeastern Oklahoma. He came to adulthood in south Texas studying ceramics at Texas A&M University Corpus Christi. He earned his MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2018 and has completed residencies in Pennsylvania and New York state where he spent time at Millersville University and Chautauqua School of Art. He attended art and philosophy seminars at the American Academy in Rome and has exhibited across the United States in artist-run spaces, galleries, and museums such as San Angelo Museum of Art, TX, South Texas Museum of Art, TX, University of Colorado Boulder Museum of Art, CO, Millersville University, PA, Living Arts in Tulsa Oklahoma, OK, and Singapore Art Museum, SG.
