at this time of night there is no one place or the other and I see you clearly, graphite and oil on canvas, 18 x 18 in, 2024
Alex Callender
Massachusetts, USA
Visual
Henderson Award
Artist in Residence, 2025
↗ https://alexcallender.com
Artist Statement
My art practice incorporates painting, drawing and installation to trace and remap historical materials as a means to explore with both criticality and care, how we might disentangle the interwoven relations of race, gender, and capitalism. Drawing largely from archival sources my work engages the mythic and residual forms of coloniality to think about ways that we orient ourselves to the past; using different visual modes of annotation, hybrid narratives, and speculative storytelling, I try to recontextualize static (or seemingly fixed) renderings of history to consider their relationship to social forces like scale, time, and memory.
While at Headlands
At Headlands I will be thinking about grasses and their social and ecological histories, exploring the connections between colonialism, plant migration, and American economic history. By learning about native grasses and their industrialized counterparts like turf grasses, I will be working in painting and drawing to consider the absence and presence of plants in the landscape. Wild grasses are frequently drought resistant, part of pollination and soil restoration that tell a necessary story about our future and ecological transformation away from industrial lawn grasses and monoculture. The close proximity of Headlands to varied nature, and the lands former identity asFort Barry, a US army post later incorporated into the National Park system, will give me an opportunity to study and spend time thinking about ongoing legacies of colonial land management systems and the relationships between histories of (de)militarized landscapes and spaces of private and public ecology.
