Event Details

Alexandra Chowaniec // The Spaces in Between

Producer of Lynn Hershman Leeson’s !Women Art Revolution - a documentary with the rare honor to screen at the Toronto International Film Festival 2010, Sundance Film Festival 2011 and the Berlin International Film Festival 2011

As a contemporary female painter, Chowaniec seeks to confront the languages and histories of figurative painting, accessing and contributing to that dialogue through which arouses fear, desire, and pleasure. She puts forward a quotidian moment that shifts and slips to become sensuous and/or frightening, embodying the simultaneity and multiplicity of the in-between.

The paintings map these transitional spaces across bodies and extensions of the body.

Extensions include still life that holds memories of living, mirroring the organic forms of the human body and a morphology that evokes the tensions between life and death. Time is considered through cinematic means, taking the form of both sequences of individual frames and large-scale registrations of gesture over long periods. Relationships are understood as both the internal connections, exploring the roles we embody, and as the external ones, in which we intimately engage the other.

In The Spaces In Between, Chowaniec seeks to ask, through the marks, when does one thing imminently end and become another? How do these spaces in between look and feel? Means and content resist resolution but stay in productive tension, opening up the viewer’s own ways of knowing.

Alexandra Chowaniec is a visual artist creating oil paintings that conceptualize the human figure within contemporary visual culture. She is an MFA graduate from the San Francisco Art Institute and received her BFA Honors in Painting from Queen’s University in Canada. She studied painting at the Lorenzo de' Medici Art Institute in Florence, Italy during the 2003 – 2005 time period. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Galerie d’Art Jean-Claude Bergeron and Wall Space Gallery in Ottawa, Canada, The Agnes Etherington Art Centre and the Union Gallery in Kingston, Canada, and The Lab, The Best of the Bay, Art Engine Gallery in San Francisco, The Museum of Modern Art with MoPA and at Sundance New Frontier in Park City, UT. Her work was featured at the Toronto International Art Fair, Art Toronto 2010. She was awarded the Irene Pijoan Memorial Painting Award and the Helen Nininger Memorial Scholarship in Fine Art, a residency at Red Ink Studios in San Francisco, and is an SFAI grant recipient. She is a SECA Award Nominee. Her work has been published in New American Paintings, KitchArt Magazine, and Ultraviolet, and reviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle (online edition), the Ottawa Citizen, Queen’s Journal, and Art Business online. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

For the last three years Alexandra has been working with Director Lynn Hershman Leeson as Producer of feminist histories documentary, !Women Art Revolution, an official selection of the Toronto International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival and Berlin International Film Festival. The film !WAR takes Lynn's irreplaceable, personal footage of interviews with visionary artists, historians, curators and critics who shaped the beliefs and values of the Feminist Art Movement and traces the movement from its roots to the present. As the youngest artist to be featured in the film, it is Alexandra’s hope that the film will both educate and inspire our next generation. Alexandra is artist collaborator of RAW/WAR, a new media installation (www.rawwar.org) that premiered at Sundance New Frontier 2011.