Alex Rose’s work has an inane sadness to it. His investigation of impending loss, the beauty, energy and hope inherent to youth and adolescence, is layered with the threatening possibility of a life cut short.

Highly conceptualized, there is more to Rose’s work than meets the eye. His installations consist of collages, photographs, paintings and drawings. Imagery is recycled, transformed and reconstructed not only in content, but in form as well. The images, chosen from a variety of media, including ones created by the artist himself, are given a new identity. These images are served up as iconography and become a shrine that fills us with feelings we cannot readily articulate. Beautiful, intriguing, compelling, disturbing, uncomfortable are just a few of the waves that great the viewer.

Artists’ books are an important aspect of the artist’s practice. They have a strong emphasis on ephemeral forms and are exceptional, varied and creative by their very nature. Rose employs the book as an original work of art and integrates the formal means of conception and production with aesthetic and thematic aspects. True to the avant-garde practices of the early decades of the 20th century Dada and surrealist movements, Rose’s artists’ books are an attempt to democratize access to art. These one-of-a-kind, 3-dimensional book objects are exhibited in place of artworks, thus becoming the artwork itself. While they are kept as diaries, they quickly turn into visual novels most of which, upon completion, are either buried or burned. This ritualistic aspect, for lack of a better word, is something that hovers over all of Rose’s work.

The main objective for the artist lies in creating his work. It is something very personal and it is dealt with as such. On occasion, some of it will be shared with others, some of it will not. Its joy lies in experiencing the work now and for as long as it lasts.