Alex in her Joshua Tree home, photographed by Megan Kantor, 2024.
about the artist (Link to CV):
Alex Maceda (b.1989) is a Filipina-American artist and writer living and working between Joshua Tree, California and New York City. Her energetic painting and lyrical writing explore the medial spaces between waking and dreaming, reality and imagination, literal and abstract. She is particularly inspired by the human condition and the feminine experience, as well as esoteric, shamanic, and spiritual themes.
Defined by movement, her abstract practice utilizes the physicality of freeform mark-making and experiments with the materiality of paint and it’s transparency (or lack thereof) to articulate layered, multi-faceted compositions. In her abstract figuration, Alex makes manifest compositions she sees in dreams and meditative states onto canvas, and/or depicts archetypal, yet specific, experiences she has in her waking life.
She holds a BA in Classical Studies with a Minor in Studio Art from Dartmouth College and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. She is an incoming MFA candidate in Painting at the New York Studio School. Alex is passionate about mental health and a dedicated student of yoga, meditation, and other healing modalities. She was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and spent her summers in Manila, Philippines.
Artist Statement — Summer 2024
My goal in this life is to create beautiful things that make people feel less alone. That is, to visually express the human experience in order that viewers might see themselves in it; that they might think, “oh, you feel it too.” This is what great works of art have done for me and this is what I aim to accomplish through my painting.
For me, art is spiritual practice. Making art is moving energy. Struggles within a painting or within my life are resolved by painting through it. I prescribe to a shamanic view of the world: everything (i.e. land, elements, animals, etc.) has a spirit and these spirits would like to communicate with you. “Reality” as most see it is only a very small part of the picture. I am dedicated to the parts that may be impossible to “see.” My work relies on an interplay between opacity and transparency via the textured application of paint and/or the use of exposed canvas to question what we (can) see, what comes through, what lies behind and beneath.
The figures in my work are vaguely feminine, but often androgynous, and intended to be more symbolic of a universal human soul or archetypal spirit rather than a portrait. They often appear as limbs reaching, hands grasping for balls of light: the fate which we all strive, consciously or unconsciously, towards. Suns and moons appear in the same composition to indicate the passing, or compacting, of time across feminine shapes and landscapes. Figures dance together in ecstatic partnership, or attempt to, forever frozen a finger’s length distance away.
I paint from my experience of my life: emotional references of specific ephemera that I turn into archetypal truths. I’m interested in moments that are so deeply personal that they become universal. The edge of new intimacy. Feminine ecstasy. Deep longing for the unknowable. With paint I aim to digest and find visual equivalents for these sensations in order to both assert – and affirm – the reality of these experiences.