During the pandemic I began following Alyson Provax’s work via her Instagram feed. Her method of creating shapes with print repeated with stunning accuracy in letterpress captured my attention and I reached out. We began a soft (and ongoing) collaboration. She printed phrases we generated together on paper and then mailed it to me. Part bibliomancy, part instinct led me to created context for the transparencies with different books I had on hand.
Alyson Provax is a text based artist. Her primary medium is letterpress and she often uses repetition as a drawing tool rather than to make multiple originals. This calls into question the didactic certainty of text and can cause the viewer to notice the experience of reading. She is interested in the ways that we communicate things we are a bit uncertain of and how we tie our understanding of ourselves to language.
She has shown regionally at 1122, Agenda, Carnation Contemporary, Eugene Contemporary Art, Upfor Gallery, The Vestibule, Wolff Gallery, and the Whatcom Museum, nationally at A.I.R. Gallery and The Untitled Space in New York, and internationally at the Blueproject Foundation in Barcelona. She is a member of the Portland-based Well Well Projects.
She has an interest in alternative projects and in 2020 held an exhibition with Archer Gallery remotely via mail and internet. In 2019 she created a room with animations, blankets, and vinyl text for amplifier an immersive art experience in Portland curated by Blake Shell. In 2018 she made letterpress billboard works shown in Seattle for Vignettes and Gramma’s A LONE, and again in 2019 for something nameless in Portland, and in 2020 for Montalvo Arts Center’s lone some.
Her work has been published in the Buckman Journal, Berm, Poetry Northwest, and The Racket. Her first book was published by Volumes Volumes in 2019, and in 2023 her second book was published by National Monument Press. Her work can be found in the collection of SFMOMA Library and Harvard University Library.
