My studio practice traces the lingering effects of intimate and ecstatic gestures through a transdisciplinary approach to material indexing. I crave the sensation of heat when I make: a pursuit for the warm and fuzzy and the hot and sweaty. With skin contact as the activating site for my work, I inquire how intimate rituals, from the mundane 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.
I cannot wash myself of the perverse acts and stains that have shaped me, but repeated attempts to do so have tethered my practice to an expanded vernacular of printmaking. Discipline, iteration, and exchange guide my hands as I translate sentiments held in undergarments, domestic objects, and analogue photographs into cherished relics.
Functioning as conduits of collective remembrance, the elegiac tableaus I stage traverse a melancholic aftermath in the wake of heightened states of pleasure. My images and objects arise through necessary acts of care-taking, as the processes of transfer and removal inherent in my material affinities compose tender requiems for 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 Unabashed Relics (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.
In May of 2026, they completed an MFA in Printmedia at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where they were also a Special Collections Assistant at the Joan Flasch Artsits’ Books Collection.