Alex Younger

BA, 2012, Swarthmore College; MFA, 2018, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Exhibitions: Union League Club, Chicago; Sullivan Center, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Woman Made Gallery, Chicago; Gallery No One, Chicago; Bibliography: Gender Assignment; In Memory and Memory; Free Radio SAIC; Hooligan Magazine. Awards: ACRE Residency; Luminarts Fellowship Finalist.

My work begins and ends with language. Using digital jacquard and hand weaving, screen printing, dye, and photography, I apply text as content and composition. Playing with the politics of visibility and erasure around sexual trauma and political action, I exploit the inherent properties of my materials and processes to achieve poetics through didacticism.

I merge distinctly textile processes and forms – complex multicloth handweaving structures, sections of floating warp, hand-dyeing techniques, stitchwork, and stenciled discharge monoprints – to create unsettling declarative works. Using legal texts and composed political declarations as primary source material and visual compositions, I strip the documents of the artifice of neutrality. Hiding, erasing, or fracturing text through the intervention of image or material, the pieces highlight the construction and fragility of the narratives we build. Delicate but flexible and moveable, my pieces are multifunctional: monumental wall pieces or intimately textured images that also serve as interactive performance props to explore the tactility and semiotics of authority and protest, considering the items, locations, and actors necessary to create a political action.