The Elegy paintings are composed by transcribing material collected from letters and notebooks. Selections of text are overlaid onto the ground of the support to form meanders, webs, and veils; text becomes form.
Alexander Irving. Elegy. Acrylic on linen.
Member since: 2024
Number of exhibitions at the gallery: 1
Tell us a story about Red Head: I have been acquainted with Red Head Gallery and its artists since moving to Toronto in the early 90s. Having recently become a member, I have enjoyed the camaraderie and mutual support the collective offers, as well as a commitment to the wider community through exhibitions like Get Noticed and engaging with artists and artists’ collectives both nationally and internationally.
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 nationally 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 personal reflections and seminal texts 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.”
