Jesse Alexander

Junior's latest exhibition, Jesse Alexander: 12 x 100 has transformed the entire gallery space in Brighton into a kind of underwater mise-en-scene. The untitled work pictured here is just a detail of the prodigious mono-print of the ocean's surface. To create this piece, Alexander and "a van load of friends" brought rolls of 12-by-100-foot black paper and non-toxic white paint to the beach. There, they cast the paper onto the ocean, waited for the waves and jetties, and made this extraordinary print.

Printing the ocean is not a common thing, and seems at first unfeasible. But with the right materials and some patience, Alexander's result is a stunning look into a place of mystery and possibility -- the ocean -- on the only scale that could do that place justice.

Two things come to mind: First are Leonardo da Vinci's studies of water. Alexander's print leads us to think about the ocean and its qualities in a very different way than one would when playing at the beach -- or even than photographing a wave would. His print captures not stillness, but dynamism. Nothing is stopped for us to examine; the work seems to shift, as does our perception. That capturing of movement, change and the power of water echo Leonardo's studies in a way best described as reflective.

Second, I think of Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty." I might be thrown off here, because both Alexander and Smithson recorded their water-based artwork with the video camera. In that way, though, both Alexander's print and Smithson's jetty are as much performance pieces as they are works on paper or sculpture. The act of creation becomes just as important as the grand print.

Alexander's mono-print is a document, as much as the video that plays at Junior. The art is the idea behind it, both concrete and transitory. It is the ocean, the movement of the unknown -- both the water's depths and the experimental print process itself.