The Artists' Prison

The Artists' Prison by Alexandra Grant. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780998861616.

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 prisons warden, written by Alexandra Grant, and powerfully allusive images by Eve Wood, 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 books critical edge is sharpest. In structural terms, The Artists Prison represents a unique visual and literary intersection, in which Woods drawings open spaces of potential meaning in Grants text, and the text, in turn, acts as a framework in which the images can resonate and intensify in significance.