Bel Ami presents a solo exhibition titled Immutable Fragments, by Alexis Soul-Gray. An opening art party was held on July 22, 2023, however the exhibition runs through September 9, 2023. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States as well as the culmination of her two-year MFA at the Royal College of Art in London.
Artwork by Alexis Soul-Gray; courtesy of the artist and gallery
Immutable Fragments Alexis Soul-Gray
Alexis Soul-Gray’s unique process combines painting, drawing and collage. This allows her to performatively investigate how imagination illuminates a pathway forward through sadness and loss. Like Lewis Carroll’s journey through the looking glass, Soul-Gray shows how curiosity and experimentation peel back hidden layers. Therefore these layers reveal the emotional life of childhood and how it conditions our perceptions and responses into adulthood.
For this exhibition, Soul-Gray sources illustrations from fairy tales as well as the nostalgic imagery of advertising. These depictions were designed to invoke in the consumer their own desires and fears. The found images function as screen memories. They also refer back to Sigmund Freud’s concept of a falsified image that stands in for an experience too disturbing to recall. Several years ago Soul-Gray began sifting through clothing catalogs seeking traces of her mother, who was a textile designer. The artist did this as a way to grieve her mother’s death and access painful trauma. When Soul-Gray was twenty-five, her mother chose to end her own life after suffering from cancer. “I am searching for touch. For a touch I cannot remember or perhaps never received enough of,” Soul-Gray says.
About Alexis Soul-Gray
Alexis Soul-Gray (b. 1980, UK), lives and works in Devon. She earned an MA in Painting at The Royal College of Art, London (2023) and a BA in Drawing at Camberwell College of Arts, London (2003). She is an alumni of The Royal Drawing School, London having completed the Postgraduate Drawing Year in 2007. Solo exhibitions include Wetterling Gallery, Stockholm (2022); Irving Contemporary, Oxford (2022); Exeter Phoenix Gallery, Exeter (2022); and Delphian Gallery, London (2021). Recent group exhibitions include Paper, Tristan Hoare Gallery, London (2023); Conscious Unconscious, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London (2023); Women Celebrating Surrealism, Islington Arts Factory, London (2022); What Was lost, PAPER Gallery, Manchester (2022). She was the winner of the Delphian Open in 2021 and recipient of The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in both 2021 and 2022.
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On view: July 22, 2023 – September 9, 2023
What: Immutable Fragments Alexis Soul-Gray
Where: Bel Ami, 709 N. Hill St. inside Asian Center upstairs suite #105 & #103, LA, 90012
When: Running through September 9, 2023
Website: http://belami.info
