Art Files: Alex Gabriel
Performative Writing/The Joke Is on Me, Digital collage, size variable, 2022.
What did your ancestors need but could not get?
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, mistakes, misfortunes need not have been in vain?
Alex Gabriel’s work is an art practice as a generative method to create space for questions held in somatic, cultural, and ecological bodies. Gabriel’s paintings are a personal working through and understanding of landscapes as relational spaces through which the artist can approach, slip between, and quiet (if not answer) the questions to the right. Since moving from Iowa to Colorado, Gabriel’s studio practice has become ever more explicitly connected to the land itself, in a curiosity-fueled joy of finding new ways to be with it. Quick minimal sketches on the trail inspire larger paintings completed at home, which are in turn packed up and brought back out to the land. There they become quilts to lay over barbed wire and interrupt someone else’s interruption of the horizon. These are not pure wilderness spaces, but they stir a wildness that drives a desire to reimpose the landscape back upon itself. Gabriel plays with materiality to orient herself in these new landscapes, creating a conversation with the land as best she can, in an act of aesthetic reciprocity and communication.
Cultural Object(s), Digital collage, size variable, 2019.
Gunnison Gorge Tapestry 1, Mixed media on canvas, photographed in Gunnison Gorge, CO, 10 x 12 ft, 2020.
Trail Drawing: Raggeds Wilderness, Marker on canvas, 10 x 12 in, 2021.
Trail Drawing: Lone Cabin Road, Marker on canvas, photographed on the trail location, 10 x 20 in, 2021.
