Alexa’s work focuses on the exploration of body and environment, with an emphasis on identity construction and the boundaries between things. She invites a multidisciplinary process incorporating performance, mixed media, and installation.
Alexa studied communications at U.C. Berkeley where she was exposed to the critical and social theory which has informed her work ever since. Having danced most of her life, she spent several years focused as a modern dancer in the Bay Area, until attending Syracuse University for her MA in Communication Rhetoric. Her Master’s project blended phenomenology, social theory, and dance, to produce a community movement workshop to reflect on identity construction and cultivate empathy between self and other. This process was informed by her residency with Dance Exchange. She has also worked as a prop & fashion stylist for brands such as Apple and Levi’s, and has designed for commercial and residential interior design firms.
After moving back to San Francisco, where she still resides and works, Alexa began incorporating painting and mixed media into her movement work through photography, video, and live performance. Alexa often paints glass and plastic planes and then arranges the body behind them. In this process the body and environment blend into one. Her intension is to break down separations between identity ideology and to cultivate connection through shared human experience.
When considering how to strip down identity to its most basic form- deconstructing the body and material– the purity of the four elements remain: fire, air, earth, and water. As a sort of ecological excavation, in this residency, Alexa’s intension is to explore ritual with the elements- creating an interaction with the elements to embody our basic elemental nature. With installation and performance incorporating plastic or glass panes, Alexa will visually externalize internal layers of psyche and belief as it relates to our pure and yet complex nature of the elements.
More information
www.alexaeisner.com
Pictures Gallery
To be posted soon