moments in time
Anthony R. Grant
Mighty Mighty Studio
480 23rd St., Oakland
Closed
If you had just one hour in your studio to make a print, what would you make and how would you print it? What about three hours? Five? How ‘bout eight?
Deeply informed by time and space, Anthony R. Grant fashions collages with people and places near and dear to his heart, while working within the confines of outside full-time employment, fatherhood, and the general hustle of life here in the Bay. (That employment: product designer at one of the big three that shall not be named, a “big company” he’d “love to leave" but, ya know, art supplies ain’t cheap.) His solo show “moments in time,” which closed last Friday at Mighty Mighty Studios, was a collection of small hung collages works overlooking a jenga’d tower of equally intricately printed boxes.
The artist, plastic wine glass in hand, was rearranging some of those boxes as I browsed, creating new pathways and mapping out new routes of faces and places. Was there a reason, rhyme, order, chronology to the works and how they were displayed, I asked?
Nope, just aesthetics.
The subjects, however, are deeply intentional. Newspaper and magazine cuttings, superhero comics, famous artists, athletes are interspersed with pop-art and paint swatches, splotches, and sketches. Though anonymized, some faces remain easily recognizable, others an unsettling but lovely hodge-podge of features, a woman who never was but will now live on.
The maps: charting Grant’s life from state to state, his grandmother’s home land of Jamaica, a suppressed desire to expand his reach beyond those borders, beyond the confines of the cardboard and wood paneled pieces he has printed on thus far.
Describing the Floridian and New York scapes, Grant began to choke up. This push to work larger, more loudly, may not be simply a desire, but a need, and perhaps the literal space to work out ideas and feelings in real space and time will aid in this exploration.
Sourcing those maps from high and low, he then adds layer upon layer of inks, forms, feelings. One session may employ a gel plate or silk screen, another an inkjet printer and a sharpie, swirls or scrapes of paint. Each piece may be an isolated moment, yes, but also easily integrates into the whole, a mismatched map of a man’s identity written in cardboard and reversed lettering. I do hope to see him take on a far larger scale, a wall or room-sized collage of feelings of space and place, a true immersion of history and character to exist within, if just for a few moments.
A full list of works displayed here.
