Premio Combat Prize

BIO
Alexandra Carter was born in 1985 in Boston, Massachusetts. She received her B.A. in Studio Art from Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee in 2009. In 2012, she received her Post-
Baccalaureate Certificate in Fine Art at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in
Baltimore, Maryland. She is currently in her second year of the MFA Program in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College in London. Carter has exhibited in solo exhibitions in Memphis and Buenos Aires, where she held a residency at the Projecto’ace Foundation in August of 2011. Other residencies have included the the Galerija-Muzej Lendava in Slovenia and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally in such places as Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Boston University, Red Gallery (London), Coos Art Museum (Oregon), and Athens Institute of Contemporary Art (Georgia). Carter currently lives and works in London.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT
Drawing from my personal background while riffing on themes of gender, fairytale, desire and insanity, I investigate the psyche in a dynamic of concurring identities. I’m interested in the push-pull relationship between the effort to control or contain versus the need for catharsis or purge, sometimes in the most dramatic way. I play with this idea literally, visualizing the body coming out of itself, exposing not only one’s guts but one’s internal state--one’s emotions, one’s craziness--in a way that can seem both pleasurable and painful. I use coloured ink on a variety of surfaces including mylar. The spontaneous behaviour of watered-down pigment over the misty surface of the film emphasizes the visceral loss of control, of permeating beyond one’s own boundaries.