Bio

Alex Grabiec is an artist based out of rural Virginia. His work considers the concept of place and experience through narrative, memory, and metaphor in order to examine both personal and collective myths. Born in 1984, Alex earned his BFA in 2007 from Longwood University and in 2016 an MFA in Photographic and Electronic Media from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He has exhibited his work in the New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1, the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Katzen Art Center at American University. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at Hampden-Sydney College. He lives in Farmville, Virginia with his wife and son.

Artist Statement

This body of work titled back east is a group of peripatetic images that offer oblique hints to the transitory nature of place and experience. Photographed along a weekly four-hour commute between a professional life in Baltimore and family life rural Virginia, the series reflects on the desire for home and the resulting perpetual search for it. Within this personal narrative interweaving subtexts of demarcation, construction, distance, and longing consider the relative ideas of ‘back’ and ‘east’. In doing so, proposes that memory, hopes, and experiences are always in another time, and always somewhere else.

Image credit: Alex Grabiec, Fence in a field, 2015, Archival pigment print, 20 x 25 inches