"Beyond the Mythic & Mundane" 3-Person Show: July 2022
Three-person group exhibition with Alexis Beucler, Emily Magnuson, and Elizabeth Powell at Charles City Arts Center, Charles City, IA. Read the press release here.
Beyond the Mythic & Mundane
Three-Person Exhibition with: Alexis Beucler, Emily Magnuson, & Elizabeth Powell
The works in this exhibition bounce between representation and abstraction of natural forms. The mythic, something othered and idealized, collides with the mundane, something earthly and the everyday. For all three artists, the flow state is integral. It’s a state where the mundane melts away and through the repetition of form, mark making, and the challenging of bodily and mental limits, the mythic is found.
For Elizabeth, the mythic and mundane is blurred between abstracted bodies, caged by skeletal nets of ribbons or lingerie, and an insistent demand to fill space and be seen. Her work focuses on societal decorum of feminine beauty, and the conflation of expression and repression that is installed within the female body. In her work, the tension between the biological and the psycho-social unravels.
For Emily, the mundane is elevated to the mythic through vivid silk paintings of poisonous plants found in the gardens that surround our homes; or through working with clay, engaging with the earth, and firing ceramics brutally hot in otherworldly pools of glaze. Tying the mediums together is an insistence on filling space, the power of a flow state, and the need for material experimentation.
For Alexis, her work focuses on the Queering of Space through a full spectrum of color, patterned landscape, and depiction of intimate joy between figures. Characters repeat, landscapes intertwine, time ebbs and flows. Like memories drifting together in a dream, time isn’t linear but rather fragmented, sometimes circular, and intrinsically subverts traditional narrative tradition. Alexis’s work contriubutes to reclaiming the term queer in order to challenge societal normativity (or the mundane) as a form of resistance.
We invite you to go beyond the mundane and seek the mythic. To look at everyday aspects of your life, find hidden, tender moments, and discover the extraordinary.