Alexis Zelda Stevens
30 April - 19 June 2005
Catalogue Text
Workshops and Talks
Alexis Zelda Stevens is a young emerging artist who is challenging formal notions of painting though sculptural interventions. ArtSway is very pleased to present new work by Stevens who was artist in residence at the gallery in February and March of this year.
In her earlier work Alexis Zelda Stevens produced large-scale semi-abstract images painted on canvas, accompanied by small-scale constructions and collages. The new work made during her residency at ArtSway marks a change of direction in her practice - a tactile development of her earlier paintings. Here, she is focusing upon installations with the aim of making ‘larger scale constructions involving the gallery space and the viewer more directly’. She is concerned with how the viewer reacts physically to the installations she has created in the gallery space.
Stevens is interested in the idea of structure and meaning being ruptured and fragmented by something emotive and intuitive that normally remains just below the surface, unseen. Through the suggestion of somewhat familiar spaces, in which this uncanny decentring of meaning can occur, she hopes to make a case for the importance and presence of the intuitive, in a world where meaning and logical cohesion are predominate.
Alexis Zelda Stevens graduated with a first-class BA (Hons.) Fine Art Degree from Falmouth College of Arts in 2004. She was awarded a place on the Erasmus Exchange Scholarship programme from January to March 2003 and spent three months studying at the Academy of Fine Arts In Venice. Recent exhibitions have been New Talent at The Green Rooms, Redruth in 2004 and Windows ,coordinated by Falmouth Art Projects, also 2004.
Alexis Zelda Stevens was artist in residence at ArtSway in February & March 2005. Additional financial, mentoring and critical support was provided through The Art House Morethan12 bursary scheme, funded by Esmee Fairbairn Foundation.
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Catalogue Text by Max Andrews
Alexis Zelda Stevens
The mode of practice that Alexis Zelda Stevens has consolidated during her residency at ArtSway is precarious and precocious; and it might have begun with a pink-painted branch or a dinky green ladder. The former protruded inelegantly from a deliciously clashing orange painting in Interior Landscape II (2004), one of the works in her painting degree show at Falmouth College of Arts. The latter, salvaged from a skip in the town, became a sort of studio buddy and a totem or taboo of object-ness.
Poking through a gash in the canvas, the candy-pink branch literalised a conceptual transition in Stevens’s artistic practice that is now fully realised in her two-gallery-filling installation for ArtSway. Her puncturing of this picture-surface started off as a silly, wonky gesture that seemed to mock the seriousness of the task at hand. Yet the act was a chromatically charged provocation to the authority of the canvas, and the trigger to consider working in three-dimensions more profoundly. The immediacy of the appeal of the green ladder played its part too, suggesting a scavenging approach that could make use of whatever came to hand. At the culmination of her degree, Stevens had questioned the sustainability of producing ‘proper’ paintings implied by an educational doctrine that was marinated in medium-specificity, latent concepts of expressive realism and visual language.
It would be disingenuous of me to suggest that Stevens is a necessarily Cornish artist. Though having studied at Falmouth College of Arts for a year myself in the mid 1990s, I feel as good as justified in divining that the heritage of the St. Ives School that comprised Peter Lanyon, Ben Nicholson, Patrick Heron, Barbara Hepworth et. al., with the push and pull of Constructivist formalism on the one hand and narrative plus symbolism on the other – all mashed together with the blissful naïveté of Alfred Wallis and a heady experience of landscape – must remain a forceful and wonderfully over determined field that looms over the eminent painting department of its region. In other words Stevens’ first forays away from painting inevitably meddled in their own unassumingly subversive way with the approved lineage of Cornish modern (landscape) painting.
Previously pursuing a generative, cumulative working process that resourced from photographs and sketchbooks to the end point of a large canvas, she first turned her back on the landscape by resisting the greens and blues so evocative of land and sky-sea, and adopted instead an expanded palette of more artificial colours – fluorescent puce and orange, emergency yellow and alien green. And from not only puncturing the canvas to go on to abandon it altogether, Stevens began to make constructions and accumulations of painted objects and found materials, working things out in studio space rather than on picture space.
Peter Lanyon made several three-dimensional structures using painted and coloured glass in his studio near St. Ives in the 1950s. These were at first conceived as disposable developmental devices, tools to aid the composition of his paintings, yet he went on to exhibit constructions as works of art in their own right. Stevens’s mapping of a compositional process into the gallery transposes this turn in Lanyon’s work, similarly unpicking the already-there into the constitution of a finished work. Yet the developmental precedent for Stevens’s current approach is located away from the studio or classroom entirely. The artist was home schooled until the age of nine (her parents are both artist-educators) following a trans-disciplinary, creative way of learning. The approach favoured by the Montessori Method is now distilled in Stevens’s unlearning of painting’s phantom curriculum. She is relearning to learn through exploration and, in an approximation of the singer-songwriter, scavenging-making with fluid, haptic exercises, combinations of rehearsal and composition, noodling and doodling, storytelling and picturing.
The artist’s current work for ArtSway is an alarming balancing act. Her adoption of unremarkable objects and materials – concrete, timber, chair parts, electrical tape, brightly coloured laundry line – take us well beyond the insistent mysticism of canvas and stretcher, yet abstract painting – or abstraction and paint – remains a way in for the viewer. Here the term Plasticism might denote both the compositional ‘science’ of Constructivist ecstasy, and at the same time the evolution of High Density Polyethylene milk bottles into organic forms. Her use of easily recognisable matter and materials as major elements in the otherwise formal arrangements deliberately teases the abstract credibility by the suggestion of narrative interpretations. With the introduction of (real) lights and shadows and the possibility of the viewer acting within them instead of standing passively in front of them, chiaroscuro space becomes a real space that’s somewhat domestic, possibly theatrical and potentially threatening.
In her refusal of the canvas as a host for product, and in her tempered avoidance of popular cultural imagery, Stevens wills a kind of anti-consumerist utopian compositional community into existence in the galleries together with an urgent use of colour. Nevertheless the practical ingredients of painting as a noun – support and surface – are still to be found, though sometimes they are literally hanging on by a thread. Structures made from two-by-one inch timber, the favoured college material for painting stretchers of course, have infiltrated her new aesthetic lexicon where they are pressed into service as surrogate, canvas-less entities. Tolerated like enthusiastic and benign zombies as the remnants of a painting that haunts these three-dimensional workshop-like spaces and refuses to die quietly, timber lengths are indelibly daubed with orange gloss paint – somewhat tarred if not quite feathered – and are suspended or made to lean as if in stress positions. Despite this effective deconstruction, evisceration or humiliation of painting on canvas, Stevens’s attitude is not pre-critical or too coy, nor does it ever abandon painting as a verb. It is not as blunt an instrument as Angela de la Cruz’s mangled monochromes, but it is neither too precious.
An acknowledged powerful influence on Stevens’s emerging practice is the work of Seattle-born Jessica Stockholder, whose colourful room-filling installations developed from 1983 while studying painting at Yale University. Following Stockholder, Stevens works intuitively though not necessarily as a direct response to site. Where Lanyon and his constructions at first struggled to find their own independence from his mentor Naum Gabo, Stevens too has squirmed with the anxiety of influence. In what amounts to her rediscovery of the self-directed sensibility of her childhood educational experience however, Stevens easily elides any obligations to mastery.
Max Andrews
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Exhibition Related Events and Activities:
Gallery Talk: Saturday 30 April 3:30pm.
Join ArtSway Director Mark Segal as he engages artist Alexis Zelda Stevens in an informal discussion of her work. Refreshments are provided. FREE
Youth workshop: Tuesday 31 May 5-8pm
Taking inspiration from the work of Alexis Zelda Stevens, construct an environment and learn about perspective using video cameras and editing equipment. With Lucy Fredericks COST: £10
Video Workshop: Saturday 18 June 10:30am – 3:30pm
Video camera workshop for adults led by Julie Marsh, inspired by her work. Part of ‘My Place’, a programme and website initiative focusing on digital arts in Britain organised by the BBC. Cost: £30
About Contemporary Art: Tuesday 10 & 17 May 2005 7-9pm FREE
If you are curious about contemporary art this might be for you. These relaxed and informal evenings aim to provide an introduction to and discussion about contemporary art. The sessions are structured over two evenings, where the first gives a background to contemporary art and the next session includes a contemporary artist discussing her work, life and career.
Bookings are essential – please contact ArtSway
AAAI Event: Trip to Tate Modern with ArtSway and artist Charlie Murphy
Sunday 24 April 10am – 7pm FREE
Join the ArtSway staff & artist Charlie Murphy on a tour of the Joseph Beuys exhibition at Tate Modern. Charlie will be giving her view of Beuys’ work and we will discussing the influence he has had on many contemporary artists. After Tate we will visit Charlie’s studio and also meet Susan Collis, who will be exhibiting at ArtSway over the summer. The day will end on the roof top of the studio building where we will have a nice drink.
A free bus will be leaving from ArtSway at 10pm returning by 7pm. Admission to the exhibition is £7.50 per person. (with group discount)
Modelling with Clay from life: Wednesday 4 May 7-9pm.
Learn to sculpt in clay from the life model, with ceramics artist Jackie Giron. COST: £10 (materials provided)
Jewellery workshop: Saturday 14 May 10.30am – 3.30pm.
Objects of Desire – a jewellery making workshop for adults. Come along and learn the skills to make your own unique piece of silver jewellery. With artist Kate Groombridge. COST: £30 Part of Museum and Galleries Month
Architecture Week Saturday 18 June 11am –5pm. Postcards from Lyndhurst, The Solent Centre for Architecture and Design and ArtSway artist Alaistair Gentry invite you to come and draw the architectural wonders of lovely Lyndhurst. FREE
Friday 24 June, 11am – 5pm.
Media workshop for all ages at ArtSway. Come and scan your postcard drawings of Lyndhurst and manipulate your designs with multi-media artist Lucy Fredericks. Then discuss your ideas on local architecture with Mark Drury from the Solent Centre for Architecture and Design. FREE
Holiday workshop: Wednesday 1 June 10.30am – 3.30pm.
Up! Up! And Away! Come and create your own Comic book hero. For girls and boys 6 – 11 year olds. With Illustrator Jonathan Adams. COST: £20
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