Bio and Artist Statement

Bio

J. Alex Schechter (b. 1988, Moose, WY) is a sculptor based out of Greenville, SC. Alex holds a BA in Religious studies from Grinnell College and an MFA in Sculpture from The Maryland Institute College of Art.

He has shown both Nationally and Internationally, including solo and two person shows at Flux Factory (New York, NY), Peep Projects (Philadelphia, PA), Terrault Contemporary (Baltimore, MD) and Millersville University (Millersville, PA), and group shows with Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA), Good Children Gallery (New Orleans, LA), Dodomu Gallery (New York, NY), The Sculptors Alliance (New York, NY), and the Baltimore Creative Alliance (Baltimore, MD). He has created installations for the City of Las Vegas, The Atlanta Beltline (Atlanta, GA), and Mildred’s Lane (Narrowsburg, NY) and has given talks and performances at Bowdoin College, Auburn University, the Walters Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the University of Pennsylvania.

Schechter is currently an Assistant Professor at Clemson University.





Artist Statement

My works traffics heavily in material symbolism. I make sculptures which combine traditional woodworking methods, digital fabrication and found objects with video and performance to explore the myths of the American affective religiosity, particularly focused on the American West. I make physical objects that embody not only my deep ambivalence around my family history, but also my personal attraction to and rejection of American mythology. My research explores how the American West, both as a physical and mythological space, functions as a site of eschatological fixation for American culture. These objects work in the tension between secular myth making and environmental realities, engaging in a slippage between technology, magic, ritual, myth and story. I use a wide variety of artistic and scholarly tools to engage in a practice of preservation, imagination, and survival. In reflecting on the history of making and meaning, my recent body of work embraces the monstrous and the hybrid, the transformation of the real into the unreal. Through woodworking, digital modeling, found objects, performance, and conceptual building, I complicate and call into question multiple narratives of cosmology, ownership, and frontiers.

As a transplant from a rural western state, I am drawn to the sharp contrast between quotidian realities of daily life in rural western communities and the romantic idealization of the “Wild West.” For much of the dominant narrative of U.S. history, the West has been an ordinal concept, an endless resource to compete with and stand in contrast with refined aspects of European culture, a blank canvas to be tamed with violence, or an escape route for self-reinvention. The “Frontier” maintains a potent metaphor as the new edge, yet often obscures the consequences of western expansion and imperialism. The sculptural objects I make attempt to collapse utopian ideals of Frontiers and the consequences of its reality, bringing together both the effects of anthropocentric change in landscapes and the history of western culture into a semiology which questions assumptions of a manifest destiny. Through the lens of genera fiction, particularly sci-fi, westerns, and horror, I create situations where aesthetic, emotional, and rational truths compete for primacy.

My work is in many ways in a reaction to, and rejection of, the acceptance of a determinist understanding of “Americanness.” These bodies of work use the language of Western film tropes, Jewish folk traditions, mineral extraction, 90s science fiction, and neoclassical formalism to grapple with my own anxieties around this secular eschatology. As a result of my playing with material choices and calling into question what is found object, what is mass produced, what is grown, and what is handmade. The meaning of material is not just the shape of the whole object, but the embodied meanings of each individual object play with each other in a space. I think there is a difference between house paint and automotive paint, and house paint and a houseplant. The material symbolism of this slippage functions as a shorthand for my interest in the ambiguity of cultural images and the shifting of symbols in American cultural vernacular.

Through the simulations use of digital fabrication and traditional craft, I complicate and call into question multiple narratives of cosmology, ownership, and frontiers. These objects attempt to collapse time, a personal push-back against the violence of positivism and endless expansion.