Alexa Hawksworth at Theta

Artist: Alexa Hawksworth

Exhibition title: My Wishlist

Venue: Theta, New York, US

Date: June 29 – July 29, 2022

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Theta, New York

Alexa Hawksworth renders fantastical scenes in which the mind and its sundry desires rhapsodically escape containers of the body and its earthly realm. In My Wishlist, the artist’s surreal and vivid paintings scale from compact headshots to panoramic vignettes of ecstatic dancing and superhuman transformations. Throughout, the stage is set for discordant relationships between internal thought and physical externalities to play out like holistic tragicomedies. Hawksworth’s fgures perform as janus-faced avatars in pursuit of self expression, individuation, and aspiration, ever caught up in the ego’s anxious negotiations. As particles of seductive media foat around like pollen, ingesting them causes varying reactions.

In these reifed mindscapes, false notions of progress play out across canvases teeming with movement. Characters twist and turn emphatically as though viewed through a psychological strobe, captured in the afective fash points between interiority and externalization. Elastic fgures exert themselves to bend or break the increasingly diminished barrier between corporeal and virtual. In paintings that merge the spectacular with the mundane, Hawksworth locates the imagination as the last vestige of private life.

The breathless exertion of accounting for every single perspective at once pins us like a dial on hyperspeed, advancing nowhere. This coruscating efect arrives in epic form in Hawksworth’s Lazy Susan, where the spent energy of so much stationary rotation feels suitable to power a small car. In a series of three paintings titled Blow Out, an image of a dancing woman at Studio 54 appears in the hollow form of a silhouette. Her fatness becomes an icon of attainable, feminine elan. Throughout this series the process of striving to embody her is vivaciously endeavored, suggesting varied levels of success for our protagonist mirror. By Blow Out III a failure occurs: the silhouette can’t hold us and we fall right through.