Alexander Irving

Alexander Irving has worked in a variety of media, always returning to drawing as a place of inquiry and wonder. Graduating from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1987, he has since exhibited his artwork lnationally, and internationally. His recent work is text based in pencil, paint, and print. The work is full of beginnings, repetitions, and bifurcations that never lead to unity, an end, or an exit. Drawing upon seminal text from the likes of Roland Barthes and Franz Kafka, the original is transformed into image through the transcription and layering of text.

I am interested in a text that negotiates the diversity of its possible continuance and becomes, as it were, infinite. My medium is repetition.

Alexander Irving was born in Ottawa in 1962. He studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (B.F.A. 1987), McGill University (Dip.Ed. 1992) and York University (M.F.A. 2000). A recipient of awards from the Ontario, Toronto, and Canada Councils, he has participated in residencies at the Banff Centre, NSCAD University, and in Itoshima Japan. Irving has exhibited his work in private, public, and artist run centres and has lectured on his work at the University of Guelph, OCAD University, the University of Lethbridge, and NSCAD University. Irving works in Toronto and teaches in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Toronto, Scarborough.