All images © Alex Trice, shared with permission
Prismatic pools, strings of pearls, seashells, and elemental interactions characterize the work of Alexis Trice, whose oil paintings illuminate both the beauty and the brutality of nature. Sly predators take the form a spirits or totems in a dreamlike world, their tears gushing into oyster shells or glowing bodies of water.
“(This series) is about energy: emotional and molecular. And the transference and its impact when it ripples outward,” Trice says. “The water is a source of our own universal untapped emotion. Joy, trauma, fear, ecstasy, and all the feelings that bring tears, which at times we try to keep hidden away.”
Pearls, symbols of purity and wisdom, illustrate the passing of time. The artist likens the precious material’s slow growth process to a “hardened memory,” revealed upon prying open its shell. And she visualizes the “endless, crucial dance of evaporation and condensation” in zoomorphic form, each creature’s expression treading the boundary between ecstasy and agony. She adds, “This energy releases and ultimately recycles in a continuous and painfully beautiful pattern.”
If you’re in L.A., you can see Trice’s work in Potluck at Hashimoto Contemporary through March 2. Find more on the artist’s website and Instagram.
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