My work examines nuances of subcultural archetypes within narratives of personal experience, geography, and the social conditions surrounding counterculture. The work examines intersections between the reality and fantasy of these archetypes and their relative environments. I reveal societally constructed mystifications and contrasts surrounding these subcultural participants, allowing underlying contradictions, fears, and vulnerabilities to manifest. I draw from the subculture groups that I find closest to home: BMX riders, skateboarders, Satanic-panic-era goths, self-proclaimed witches, strippers, punks, and metalheads. One of the subcultures with which I am most personally involved is Bicycle Moto-Cross (BMX). Using photography, found and donated images, painting, drawing, sculpture, and quilting, I collage these subjects together, overlapping in time, space, and shape.
Tells about your background and some of your childhood experiences that shaped you?
I am originally from Dallas, Texas. I grew up in the 80s and 90s during the Satanic Panic era, which was very prevalent in my neck of the woods since I attended a super small Southern Baptist church school. I think being under the umbrella of the Christian and conservative ideology that really permeates Texas was the main driver for me to seek the opposite, as it is for so many trying to feel some kind of individualistic or creative freedom. So I have always been extremely drawn to counterculture and subculture activities, music, fashion, sports, you name it. My parents sent me to this little church school because they thought it would give me some good structure, though they weren’t entirely religious themselves. My mom LOVED horror movies. The gorier and campier the better, so I got to watch a lot of horror movies growing up. My dad was a car salesman by day, artist and poet by night. He loved trash-picking furniture and other odds and ends to bring home and make his own. He was more like an assemblage artist but he showed me how to paint, draw, sculpt; he taught me how to make something out of nothing, which set the course for my passion for anything DIY. You’ll never want for anything when you can make it yourself.
By my teenage years, I was into all your classic "rebel starter kit" things like punk, metal, graffiti, cigs, weed, etc. My best friend, Zack, was a skateboarder, so he and I would go to this skatepark called Eisenbergs, named after the pro inline skater Arlo Eisenberg. I grew up roller skating, so I tried inline skating at the skatepark, and Zack would let me kick around on his board. I was really into skateboarding and inline skating since the X-Games were gaining popularity around that time (it had only started a couple of years prior), but I often felt isolated and discouraged because I never saw any other women at the skatepark, and young boys can be not so nice or inviting in that environment. I more or less put skating on the back burner for a long time after that.
At one point in my late teens, I had a handful of friends who rode BMX, so I'd watch and go to parks and street spots with them; they’d let me ride their bikes a little but not for too long. That era really sparked my interest in BMX, but I still never felt encouraged to try it myself. It wasn’t until years later that I fell into another crew of friends who rode BMX; they introduced me to the first ladies I ever saw who rode BMX. Back then, in the early 20-teens, there were only small crews of girls riding in a few cities who rode, and with the rise of social media (Instagram specifically), women were becoming more and more visible. That was all the encouragement I needed to finally try BMX myself, and I have been hooked ever since. Today, it’s really incredible to see how far women's BMX has come. Now, you look out and see huge numbers of women riding and absolutely shredding! I found myself feeling more confident at park riding, so I gave skateboarding another shot too; now I dabble in both, and I love it so much.
Give us some insight into the web of your intersecting themes and working with different mediums such as painting, photography, sculpture, performance, sewing, and how Skate and BMX influence your creative process?
My artwork has always circled around my experiences, personal stories, observations, and questions, that definitely stemmed from my upbringing. I am really into researching and reading sociology, psychology, human behavior, subcultures, feminism, identity, gender, and philosophy. Some other influences are films, directors like David Lynch, Alex Cox, and Quinton Tarrantino. I think about my work pretty cinematically. I like to compose my paintings/collages/quilts like they are a still from a movie, thinking about colors, time of day, characters that would fill that space, lighting and what the space says about the figure and vice versa. I'm interested in the personality of environments or landscapes and the nature of opposition, contrast, and push back within them. Skateparks and DIY spots being a hotbed for all these things. Places that hold a ton of energy and personality even when no one is there, how the shadows change during the day, or how it gets a constant makeover from graffiti. Places that disrupt the "norm" but simultaneously provide so much love, support, and community.
I am personally drawn to how women operate and navigate these spaces. I took a really deep dive into women in subcultural sports, specifically women in BMX, for my graduate thesis called SHINNERS. I am obsessed with the moments I see, and do myself, when women post their injuries after a fall to social media. Bloody shinners, broken bones, stitches, any kind of aftermath from a fall, small or large. To me, it's showcasing a vulnerability transformed into strength, a failure turned triumph. So I did an open call on my instagram, with the huge help of @theBloomBMX, inviting women to send me their pictures of injuries obtained while riding or skating. I turned all the donated injury pics into a full wall collage. I also filled the space with sculptures that mimic things you’d see at DIY spots, sometimes made from pieces sourced from DIY spots that have been torn down. It’s important that I involve my community in the art, it's my way of giving back, even if it's just a little something to look at.
BMX and skating are pure acts of art where creativity and community are the most important. At a skatepark or a spot you can leave all the shit behind, where it's just you and the landscape having a conversation without words, which is, to me, exactly what art making is.
We are intrigued by the incorporation of quilting in your work, for various reasons. The tradition of quilting encompasses activism, narrative sharing, and fostering community. The quilts look like circuit boards - intricate pathways of your cognitive processes, mirroring our layered digital culture. Can you provide further insight? When did you begin quilting, and did you receive any formal instruction?
That's a really great way to put it, a circuit board for my thought process, because it definitely is. I think a lot about the quilt as an object. Its rich history is both dark and beautiful. It's an object that is supposed to offer comfort but can also be a vehicle for symbolism and storytelling, sometimes telling painful stories, turning that pain into comfort in a cathartic process. In using quilting as an art object I'm super drawn to its ability to have movement. It’s not tightly strapped to stretcher bars like a canvas, it can take a more organic shape, it’s more like a body itself. A quilt, like the skatepark landscape, can also hold a ton of energy, it’s more alive.
I am into anything that is really process based, anything I can construct with my hands, and quilting gives me that process/building satisfaction. I make a lot of collages, screen prints, and drawings and quilting is like a giant version of those things, it’s like a big collage! Quilting also helps me really understand shape and color, you really have to think, compose and somewhat plan every move before you dive in. I work intuitively, often acting on impulses, so using a process that slows me down and forces me to think helps me work through an idea all the way through. I definitely consider quilts' history of being a mode of storytelling, but I'm also using collage as my way of taking a story and rearranging its narrative in order to use the quilt surface to tell a new story.
I started quilting in 2018. I am a life long thrifter and always collected fabric, sheets and blankets. It started with me using bed sheets as my surface to paint on, but they needed to be more rigid, they needed more weight, so I learned how to sandwich them like you would with quilt layers. Then I discovered quilt artist Ben Venom, fell in love with his quilts and their connection to DIY punk/metal/ skate culture and fashion, so I decided to give actual quilting a try. Through Venom’s own influences I learned about the Gee’s Bend quilters, Rosie Lee Thompkins, and Faith Ringold, just to name a few, who are now major influences of mine. From there on I became obsessed with learning all I could about quilters, quilting and its history.
I'm also into the resourcefulness of quilting. I try as much as possible to find fabric at thrift stores, or second hand craft stores instead of buying new. There's plenty of material already out there to use and recycle into new things.
Tell us about going to art school and showing your work in formal and non traditional settings.
A lot of my creative process is both planning and impulsive. My impulses take me to an idea and that's when I try to take a breath, try not to act too quickly, which is when the planning part begins, so I kind of move backwards from an idea in order to build it back up. I start by doing research on whatever I have in mind to talk about or make art about. Whether that be the subjects of the painting or the materials themselves and how they connect with each other. I do a ton of writing. My sketchbooks are filled with random sentences and thoughts I've written down, along with blueprint type drawings for stuff I want to build. Writing helps me explain to myself what I'm wanting to do. I'm really a quiet type so I do alot of observing, people watching, I'll put myself in situations, sneak photos, and try to be a fly on the wall. I think it's so important to just listen.
Art school was a good space to learn different materials, principles, how to use them, and how to read a piece of art. Grad school in particular really taught me a lot about myself, the risks I'm willing to take, and it really whittled me down to the kind of artist I want to be. It really shined a light on what my core values are as an artist and showed me the different paths one can take. As well as learning what I want from art, just as importantly or more, it showed me what I did not want. For me, there's a certain liberation in figuring out what you don't want, then you can really move into the future lightly, no baggage.
It’s important to me to be able to share my work with everyone and with my community in particular. I want a general audience to get curious about women in subcultural sports through the lens of art and I want all people in subcultural sports to be able to see a little bit of themselves in the work. That goes for all of the other various subculture elements I like to work with too. I find that artist-run galleries are a great space for these intersections to happen. Galleries whose aim is not necessarily to sell the most art but to show the most art to more diverse audiences.
Right now I'm in the works of making some quilt pieces for a show next year in Texas. Should be a good one! This is the newest quilt currently on display in Southern California at the Lonestar Projects in the alley adjacent to 428 S Hewitt St, Los Angeles, CA, 90013. Spirit of Halloween is curated by Zoe Alameda, Alex Carmen, and Alex Emmons.
SHINNERS PROJECT
I hope to make SHINNERS an ongoing collage project and if anyone wants to participate who has some injury pics they'd like to donate, I'm totally open to submissions, always. My first focus was women in BMX but I'd love to open it up to all action/subculture sports. And if anyone reading was interested in reading more in depth about the SHINNERS project, my thesis is open and free to the public and available to download, SHINNERS, by Alexis Mabry through the Virginia Commonwealth University portal.
Thank you for all the support and for this opportunity to share my work!
All photos courtesy of Alexis Marby
Alexis Marby @Alexis.E.Marby
Great Article about Alexis in Concept Animals
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