Alixe Turner

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Artist statement

My works are sites of examination where cultural signifiers meet private gestures. Working in a hybrid mode that merges drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation, I build artworks through layered processes that employ unconventional materials and mark-making tools, often addressing my own body and confronting its limitations. My processes often function like a game of telephone: ideas of origin, truth, and reality become distorted and destabilized. Surfaces in my work both seduce and unsettle. I build up paintings with multiple materials, excavate them, and sand them back, producing flat planes that nonetheless evoke topography and depth. The viewer confronts the gap between a distorted sensory experience and the desire for a framework that imposes meaning and order. Perspective is foundational not only to the visual arts but also to how we internalize and manipulate grids to shape our worldview, whether through borders, maps, or terrain. The grid recurs as a tool I use to disrupt and obfuscate pictorial terrain; its presence reflects my previous career making maps and my ongoing interest in cartographic systems as instruments of both knowledge and limitations. I consider the material language of bureaucracy to think through what is officially recorded, redacted, and concealed. This preoccupation led me to work with residue and transfer materials, primarily carbon paper. In a series of double-sided carbon-paper pieces, I explored optical duality: the image exists...

Artwork