Elexis Van Reen

Lives and works in Rhode Island

Artist statement

I am exploring the spaces where communication exists beyond language: the gestures, rhythms, sensations, and signals through which one thing reaches toward another. This ink-on-paper series, Signals, inhabits that space. Marks accumulate, repeat, pause, and shift, carrying the rhythm and gesture of writing without resolving into words. The mind may speak to the body, and the body may answer. One being may respond to another without words. A friend may know something about a friend without knowing how. A cell may influence another cell. A plant may acknowledge the presence of others as its roots extend through the soil. I’m drawn to these possibilities because they move between perception and intuition, the known and the not-yet-known. I think of the body as a site of sensing what is within and beyond itself, encountering what cannot always be named. The marks in this series emerge from that kind of attention. They are repeated, gestural, and responsive to what came before rather than planned. Ink pools, drags, thins, and darkens; each gesture registers the one before it, creating a visual rhythm that feels less like composition than response. The result is a language without a vocabulary, a conversation without an agreed-upon speaker or listener, an attempt to reach across the space between things. I leave the work open as a space for connection, one in which meaning is not fixed but continually formed through encounter. Each viewer brings their own experiences,...

Artwork