Emerging Artists

The Daily Palette celebrates the talents of MA and MFA students as they move toward graduation!

ALEXANDRA GABRIEL
Somehow They Existed, acrylic, chalk, housepaint, masonite and found wood, 28" x 24", 2017

Alexandra Gabriel is an MA candidate student in Painting at the University of Iowa. Originally from central Pennsylvania, in 2015 Alexandra received her BFA in Painting and Drawing with a minor in Sustainable Living from Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa. After spending time interning with Farm Sanctuary, Pasado's Safe Haven, and Green Iowa AmeriCorps, she continues to have a deep interest in sustainability and social justice, and hopes to find ways to articulate the relationships she finds between them through her art practice. She currently resides in Iowa City with her two cats, Carl and Grey-Cat. Her studio practice can be found chronicled on her instagram: @justsomefun.

In her own words:

This work began with asking myself a series of questions:
What did your ancestors need but could not get to?
What healing evaded them but is available to you?
What do you know you need to make peace within your lifetime so that their struggles, their mistakes, their misfortunes, need not have been in vain? Without meaning?

The recent studio work is the physical exploration of phenomenology and ontology of the before stated questions of historical healing and the connected desires rooted in an exploration of the meanings and implications of landscape in the anthropocene. They are an ongoing investigation of what it means to participate in contemporary perceptual reality. The ambivalence of hierarchical materialities in the work represents the movement between perceptual modes and constructs an ecological system reminiscent of the unpredictable relationships between culture and biological nature.