The Artists’ Prison Reading and Book Signing
Saturday, June 10th
4pm - 5:30pm
Ochi Projects
3301 W. Washington Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90019

Ochi Projects and X Artists’ Books are delighted to host a book signing and reading of The Artists’ Prison, written by artist Alexandra Grant, and illustrated by poet and artist Eve Wood, whose drawings for the book are currently on view at the gallery.

The Artists' Prison looks askance at the workings of personality and privilege, sexuality, authority, and artifice in the art world. Imagined through the heavily redacted testimony of the prison’s warden, the prison is a brutal, Kafkaesque landscape where creativity can be a criminal offence and sentences range from the allegorical to the downright absurd. In The Artists’ Prison, the act of creating becomes a strangely erotic condemnation, as well as a means of punishment and transformation. It is in these very transformations—sometimes dubious, sometimes oddly sentimental—that the book’s critical edge is sharpest. In structural terms, The Artists’ Prison represents a unique visual and literary intersection, in which Wood’s drawings open spaces of potential meaning in Grant’s text, and the text, in turn, acts as a framework in which the images can resonate and intensify in significance.