Alexa Hawksworth

Alexa Hawksworth renders fantastical scenes in which the mind and its sundry desires rhapsodically escape containers of the body and its earthly realm. In My Wishlist, the artist’s surreal and vivid paintings scale from compact headshots to panoramic vignettes of ecstatic dancing and superhuman transformations. Throughout, the stage is set for discordant relationships between internal thought and physical externalities to play out like holistic tragicomedies. Hawksworth's figures perform as janus-faced avatars in pursuit of self expression, individuation, and aspiration, ever caught up in the ego’s anxious negotiations. As particles of seductive media float around like pollen, ingesting them causes varying reactions.

In these reified mindscapes, false notions of progress play out across canvases teeming with movement. Characters twist and turn emphatically as though viewed through a psychological strobe, captured in the affective flash points between interiority and externalization. Elastic figures exert themselves to bend or break the increasingly diminished barrier between corporeal and virtual. In paintings that merge the spectacular with the mundane, Hawksworth locates the imagination as the last vestige of private life.

The breathless exertion of accounting for every single perspective at once pins us like a dial on hyperspeed, advancing nowhere. This coruscating effect arrives in epic form in Hawksworth’s Lazy Susan, where the spent energy of so much stationary rotation feels suitable to power a small car. In a series of three paintings titled Blow Out, an image of a dancing woman at Studio 54 appears in the hollow form of a silhouette. Her flatness becomes an icon of attainable, feminine elan. Throughout this series the process of striving to embody her is vivaciously endeavored, suggesting varied levels of success for our protagonist mirror. By Blow Out III a failure occurs: the silhouette can’t hold us and we fall right through.

Alexa Hawksworth (b. 1994, Hamilton, ON) lives and works in Montréal. She received her BFA in 2020 from Concordia University, Montréal, QC. Solo and two-person exhibitions include Semi-Detached New Build, Projet Pangée, Montréal (2021); Doubles with Roxanne Thibault, curated by Marlon Kroll, Family Exhibitions, Montréal, QC (2021); Nick Payne & Alexa Hawksworth, Sibling Gallery, Toronto, ON (2021). Selected group exhibitions include Banquette, Afternoon Projects, Vancouver, BC (2022); Echo Boomers, Projet Casa, Montréal, QC (2020).