Artist Statement

Alexis Lee is an American painter and sculptor who explores the collective and personal unconscious through contemporary mythology and folklore. Pursuing unique iterations of the universal narrative, she studies archetypes and symbols in diverse cultures of storytelling to develop and re-shape the landscape of Chaos, the void before creation, transforming it into the private abyss of the unconscious, buried in our bodies like memory. The figures that wander this predatory plane are violently abbreviated or anatomically outrageous, capturing the spectral imprints of the human conditions as they work to overcome their vessels.

Her work emerges through exposed layers of process, using gesture and resistance to form lines of destruction that collapse order and trace the mind losing its way. The markings passionately tell stories of their creation and of bodies caught in the act of becoming.

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Many have described the abandonment of symbols and mythology as an assault on our mysteries and the dehumanization of the cosmos. In their absence, we collectively experience the loss of “emotional 'unconscious identity” and the deprivation of our world from its wonders. The unconscious, however, eternally dwells in the gap of human understanding, holding the volatile push and pull of creative and destructive energies.

These unprecedented times plunge us into realms of the unknown; and as we fall into the shadows of the human mind, we witness the disturbances that also awaken profound and ancient abilities buried in the collective unconscious- the universal sitting at the bottom of our psyche. Their ripples herald a primal return to symbols, storytelling and Coincidentia Oppositorum, a state in which contradictory essences co-exist in a human reality. Here, incandescent Chaos endeavors to reshape finite reality in darkness. Here, we begin to create landscapes for the monstrous thoughts that threaten to shatter our mortal frame, in worlds apart from ours- in myth.