Liminal Gallery Podcast host, Louise Fitzjohn, speaks with contemporary artist Alexis Soul-Gray, who has a solo exhibition 'Dancing in the Dark' in our Margate-based Gallery. Alexis Soul-Gray (b.1980), lives and works in Devon and is currently studying MA Painting at The Royal College of Art. She is an alumni of The Royal Drawing School having completed the Postgraduate Drawing Year between 2006-7. Her undergraduate degree is in Drawing from Camberwell College of Art, graduating in 2003 after completing a foundation course at Central Saint Martins College of Art. Soul-Gray has held lecturing positions in universities, worked as an independent curator and is a 2021 & 2022 recipient of The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant for Painting. She has recently been artist in residence at Exeter Phoenix Gallery and Artist House Kadenowka, Poland. In 2022 she had her first solo show in a publicly funded gallery and her first international solo exhibition in Stockholm, Sweden.
‘Dancing in the Dark’ features a new haunting body of paintings by the Devon-based artist, focused on a children's party, devoid of parents, the children take on the burden of life amongst celebration, in all its beauty and sorrow. The figures Soul-Gray creates dissolve into dreamlike abstraction, overrun with vivid colour and this instability of surface blurs distinctions between figure, feeling, fantasy and reality. Dancing between representation and emotive intuitive mark making, the artist invests her work with a transcendental, almost ethereal quality by allowing the forms within her paintings to float, morph and collapse in on themselves, exploring the evolving exchange between the bodies we occupy, the world we inhabit and the individual experiences we live.
Soul-Gray’s experimental and highly energetic compositions refute normative modes of existence, challenging constructed notions of balance and harmony. Using the body to dance in defiance as well as an anchor to express psychological states, the work in the exhibition captures the sensation of fragmented memories and unconscious fears slowly emerging from the psyche. Her paintings touch on history, memory and the passing of time, particularly surrounding loss and grief. While works on vintage knitting patterns and vintage ephemera are covered with oil paint acting as a protective shield, sheltering or covering up forms - a metaphor for the recesses of the imagination where vulnerability and fear are shrouded.
Read the full press release here:
https://www.liminal-gallery.com/alexis-soul-gray-solo-exhibition
Or visit the viewing room here:
https://www.liminal-gallery.com/alexis-soul-gray-dancing-in-the-dark
Contact us: info@liminal-gallery.com
Follow us on Instagram: @liminal_gallery
With original music by Lorenzo Bonari.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
