Born in Philadelphia in 1990, Alex grew up predominantly in Central Pennsylvania. After attempting to stay in Pennsylvania for college, they moved to Fairfield, Iowa to pursue an undergraduate degree in Fine Art and a minor in Sustainable Living at Maharishi International University. Consistently balancing passions for Nature, Agriculture, and Art over the years, Alex stayed in school until they were rewarded with a Master of Fine Arts degree from The University of Iowa in 2019. Currently, they find themselves following opportunities for art and the outdoors in the western United States. After living in a rural valley between the mountains and the desert, Alex is currently living in Boulder, CO. 

What did your ancestors need but could not get to? 

What healing evaded them but is available to you? 

What do you know you need to make peace with in your lifetime so that their struggles, their mistakes, their misfortunes, need not have been in vain? Without meaning? 

 

The recent studio work is Art Practice as a teleological tool towards deep healing in regards to these questions of historical trauma held in somatic, cultural, and ecological bodies. My paintings as exploration of landscapes as ontological objects through which I can address the questions above. I am curious about what auras these hold and how that affects the understanding of Self within a ecological, or “real” landscape. They are an ongoing investigation of the term Queer Rest as a phenomena related to traditions of self-cultivation and healing. The ambivalence of hierarchical materialities in the work represents the movement between perceptual modes and constructs a queer ecological system reminiscent of the unpredictable relationships between cultural and biological nature. Representation versus embodiment of specific concepts, an important aspect of this work, is the slippage between individual pieces and installations or private performances where moments of Queer Rest can occur out of authentic relationship. These are then documented and turned back into art objects through printmaking. This is to strengthen the association with landscapes, geographies, histories, mythologies and intimacies. At times the work is an object itself, such as a painting, at others the object is the vessel for the images contained. My intent with all work is exploration of experiences and perceptions of landscapes. My need is for the work to absorb as well as express the raw phenomena of innate kinships in ecology. To straddle the ontological object of materials and physicalize the invisible phenomena of meaning-making that occurs through asking about our histories with landscapes.

 

 In our contemporary time of the Anthropocene and all that that implies, healing our trauma related to the landscape drives this work, which stems from my need for a type of rest originating in my body, and I intend my paintings/drawings/prints to empathize and alleviate that need. This work began with asking myself a series of questions, and although the objects are not the answers I originally desired- they have become spaces where I look to be honest with ourselves about the aesthetic dimension we are living in.