Alix Jo Ryan is an artist and gardener
whose work mulls the notion of the grid,
both as an imposed framework which maps out individually owned plots of land through the project of settler colonialism
(and more specifically the Homestead Act),
and in the sense of quilting––organizing materials into patterns and stitching them together into entanglement.
The work grapples with the imposition of a grid as an impossible yet normalized phenomenon,
understanding the accumulation of property through violence to be constitutive of contemporary notions of freedom, open space, and wilderness.
b. On unceded Clackamas and Cowlitz land (Portland, OR)