image by ryan rudewicz
Artist Statement
My transdisciplinary practice traces the affects lingering from familiar gestures of intimacy and ecstasy.
I crave the sensation of touch and the feeling of warmth when I make: a chase for the warm and fuzzy and the hot and heavy. Sweat dripping down my brow and into my eye transformed into a single tear running down my cheek and dissolved upon impact to the ground I plant myself upon. With skin contact as the activating site for my studio, I inquire how intimate rituals, from the banal to the carnal, coalesce in heat-driven processes such as glass blowing and wax casting, and how they are venerated in textiles that come into close contact with the body.
Refusal to wash my hands of the perverse acts and stains that have formed a practice tethered by discipline, iteration, and exchange propels me to work within an expanded vernacular of print. Functioning as conduits for collective remembrance, the elegiac tableaus I stage traverse a grief-laden aftermath in the wake of heightened states of pleasure. These images and objects that then arise through necessary acts of collective care-taking sing a tender requiem for the moments that can never be experienced again exactly as they once were.
Bio
Alex Blom (he/they, b.2001 Louisville, KY) is a transdisciplinary artist who investigates the affective nature of intimate and ecstatic gestures on the body. Articulated through blown glass forms, wax casts from lovers’ undergarments, and the use of textile objects as both subject and substrate, he considers how ecstatic states from fleeting experiences can be preserved as relics.
Blom holds a BA in Studio Art from the University of Denver and was a four-year NCAA Division I swimmer with the DU Pioneers. He has served on the Media and Marketing Committee for Mo’Print Colorado and completed the Create Award Residency at Art Gym Denver. Alex has completed residencies at the Art Gym Denver and at Kriti Gallery in Varanasi, India. Recent notable exhibitions include Catholic Gilt (Solo, Memento Mori Gallery, Denver), Rhythm Collision (Friend of a Friend, Denver), and forthcoming Vivid Icons (Revelry Gallery, Louisville). In 2025, he, along with collaborator Nicholas Waguespack, co-founded Queer Impressions: an international printmaking portfolio project that highlights the dissemination of LGBTQ+ visual culture, lineage, and collective histories through means of exchange. The first iteration, Queer Impressions: Experimental Approaches to Print, was collated and displayed in an exhibition at Ohklahomo in Chicago’s Ukranian Village.
They are currently a Special Collections Assistant at the Joan Flasch Artsits’ Books Collection while pursuing an MFA in Printmedia from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.