Jeff Grant was born 1975 in New York and studied at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1998 and at Goldsmiths College in London in 2000.
He currently works between NY and Berlin, exhibiting in Europe and throughout the US.
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My work interrogates the familiar. More precisely, it reveals a distrust in familiarity.

The term withershins, a variant spelling on the word widdershins, is defined both as “counterclockwise” and also as “contrary to the natural course”. This is a consistent thread running through my oeuvre. The work I make questions the way in which history and memory affect our affinity with certain objects and visual material.

There is a type of playfulness in my art. My projects are characterized by the use of a variety of media (sculpture, drawing, installations using found and hand made objects, etc.). It borrows from commonly found images and products. Educational books and science manuals that display illustrations of accepted facts, for example. Toys and three-dimensional reproductions of existing animals and things are directly used. Representations are manipulated and used to create questionable depictions of natural order.

From this familiar material, I select and emphasize particular lineaments. In this way, the specificity of an object or image’s qualities are manipulated, reaffirmed, or disregarded. This effects the selection of, and the way in which, this material (animals, plants, toys) is combined in my work. It is in the combining of elements that our familiarity with facts is further called into question.

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Holiday Art Editions

arts critic ATL, by Catherine Fox. September 21, 2009