Alex Frost: Adults

Exhibitions

22 September - 4 November 2007

British artist Alex Frost works in a variety of media. This exhibition presented a selection of recent sculptures, drawings and mosaic panels. These reflected Frost’s interest in the conflation of modern technology, the serial and the multiple with a distinctive hand-made aesthetic.

His work ranges from the miniature to the monumental, from intimate decoration to architectural intervention, and locates itself in many differing contexts; the space of the studio, the gallery, wastelands, parks, and cultural centres. Frost’s Adults are rock-like sculptures, malformed and enlarged versions of food packaging that are at once sophisticated and clumsy. The sculptures are informed by the well-intentioned community projects that he was involved with as a teenager in north London.

Format Wars is a single work divided into two parts that augments the Adults series. As a two part work it conveys a variety of oppositions such as the domestic versus the public, the digital versus the analogue, the intimate versus the exposed, the defined versus the unclear. This is emphasised by one part being placed within the gallery and the other mounted high on the gallery’s exterior wall. Embedded within the ceramic-tiled surfaces are the symbols for the HDDVD and Blu-ray formats. Such collision between Frost’s reference to the stuff of domestic DIY with the promise and sophistication of digital advancement is both playful and poignant.

Frost’s use of mosaic bears a formal relationship with the digital or bitmap imagery that he employs for creating his ‘blind drawings’. In these, photographs are converted into bitmap prints and each pixel ‘punctured’ with a pin from the reverse allowing the application of metallic enamel paint to seep through to create a bejewelled surface.

Alex Frost: Adults was a collaboration with ArtSway, Hampshire. Alex Frost was in residence at ArtSway, which is based in the New Forest, from 10 August – 12 October 2007, with an exhibition from 23 February – 6 April 2008. A publication is available for Frost’s ArtSway exhibition, published in collaboration with Milton Keynes Gallery, ArtSway and Sorcha Dallas. Alex Frost is represented by Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow.