Alex Grabiec: Back East

Alex Grabiec: Back East by Aline SmithsonApril 9, 2017

©Alex Grabiec

The search for home, or at least a sense of home, is always illusive. Alex Grabiec has created a narrative of familiar interiors and landscapes that combine into a photo album of sorts, providing images that don’t tell the story but add up into a collective memory. Alex currently has work in the group exhibition, Museum of Real and Odd, curated by Jeremy Efroymson, at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art. The show includes 13 artists: Nayda Collazo-Llorens in collaboration with Ander Monson, Scott Raymond & Heather Abels, Jennifer Scheuer, Ed SYKES, Robert Thurlow, Katy Unger, Alex Grabiec, Julio Orta, Pato Hebert, Cassandra Klos, Josh Haines, and Michael Jordan, aka Alkemi and runs through April 15th.

Alex Grabiec is an artist based out of rural Virginia. His work considers the concept of place and experience through narrative, memory, and metaphor in order to examine both personal and collective myths. Born in 1984, Alex earned his BFA in 2007 from Longwood University and in 2016 an MFA in Photographic and Electronic Media from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He has exhibited his work at the New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1, the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Katzen Art Center at American University. He is currently an Adjunct Professor of Art at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia where he lives with his wife and son.

©Alex Grabiec

Back East

This body of work titled back east is a group of peripatetic images that offer oblique hints to the transitory nature of place and experience. Photographed along a weekly four-hour commute between a professional life in Baltimore and family life rural Virginia, the series reflects on the desire for home and the resulting perpetual search for it. Within this personal narrative interweaving subtexts of demarcation, construction, distance, and longing consider the relative ideas of ‘back’ and ‘east’. In doing so, proposes that memory, hopes, and experiences are always in another time, and always somewhere else.