Artist Statement

When I was seven, three bizarre, unrelated accidents killed six people. Neighbors sailed over a dam, my brother fell from a cliff, and a nearby nuclear reactor exploded. My work arose from speechlessness.

I chronicle near impunity in war-torn Ciudad Juárez, México, and elsewhere. I fuse contemporary disasters with fragments of Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian art. In one instance, I have pulled lacerated legs from a Rogier van der Weyden crucifixion and given them new life among the corpses of Juárez. I overhaul centuries-old narratives in large polyptychs. These include: The Last Supper, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and River Styx. I draw with a knife. I scrape and slice through black ink into wood panels prepared with white clay. Each excision pulls light into a dark field.

Woodcuts provide another means to gouge below surfaces. Limited edition prints include an homage to 1990 U.S. Poet Laureate Mark Strand’s poem, The Room. This boxed suite of 13 woodcuts is signed by myself and Strand.

Four decades ago, I created Plato’s Easy Chair, a sculpture that mushroomed into a burgeoning ‘erector set’ to build in situ architectures. I armor plate scrap wood constructions with aluminum offset printing plates, aluminum cans, and hundreds of thousands of aluminum tacks. For the past 15 years, these structures evoke the organic architecture of Visión en Acción, a Juárez psychiatric facility, and include life-size woodcuts of its residents.

My unflinching depictions of injustice cradle pain, rage, loss, and occasional black humor. I hope they embolden radical altruism.


Email: aliceleorabriggs.art@gmail.com