Her work embodies an experience of the Other through the visual and literary motif of the portal, a gateway that appears alongside a variety of characters, objects and places reminiscent of alchemy, French surrealist poetry, and other artists’ writings such as Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington. Oil paintings on ellipse and circular forms with undulating depths act as doorways to events of transformation and passages. To make these paintings, a cast of characters and objects playing specific roles in relation to a continual motif of citrus/stone fruit. She is investigating modes of communication that convey the potential for extraordinary moments of transcendental activity and experiences in our realm. Alongside this is a collection of her personally written literature, mostly prose, that builds on similar ideas while evoking visceral and ephemeral imagery to build on a specific sense of inhabited presence in surreal otherworldly places. This place of Other evokes a mysterious fluidity; like a shifting labyrinth wherein you cannot be sure if the next thing to present itself will provide you with the key, per se, but you will certainly gain more information from the transpiring of its events.
Alexandra Lane Ries (b.1996) is an artist currently living in Brooklyn, NY. Originally from Atlanta, she received her BFA in Sculpture and Ceramics from Augusta University in 2018 and is currently studying for her Master of Fine Arts in Painting at Brooklyn College.