Relume

Alexis Taylor / Monaco Project Space

March 1, 2024 - March 30, 2024

ARTIST BIO

Alexis Taylor [Missouri, b. 1999]  is a multidisciplinary artist based in St. Louis, Missouri. 

Self-trained, Alexis’s multidisciplinary practice centers girlhood, curiosity, spirituality, and connectedness. She constructs fantasy realms using abstraction to reanimate memories. Through reimagining these experiences, she reclaims authorship over past traumas and desires. 

Working primarily with acrylic and ink, Alexis’s vibrant colors recall the frivolity and playfulness of the 90’s camp movement. Her powerful feminine figures pay homage to Vonda, Alexis’s grandmother - a regal hairdresser with roots in dirt-floor farms.

Her goal is to continue building new worlds through her art, exploring themes of identity, resilience, and the power of imagination. She is currently working on a series of  ram board fans and performance art exploring dyadic coping and intimacy. 

In 2020, Alexis published her first book Celestial Cowgirl, a deep dive into full circle puddles of love, triumph, traumas, and healings. She also works as a muralist, and is currently the Assistant to the Gallery Manager through an extended internship at The Luminary. 

EXHIBITION STATEMENT

Monaco is proud to present Relume, Alexis Taylor’s first solo exhibition of mixed media work. Relume is an invitation to enter a new realm of play - one that nurtures what might otherwise be lost in the face of growing-up. 

Relume celebrates the non-perfect, the surreal, and the nonsensical. Alexis’s ultra-personal works are automatic responses to confronting the task of womanhood. Non-linear storytelling gives space for contradictions. Constructed objects - such as a painted hand-fan made from flooring material - explore the tender space between softness and grit.

In her figurative work, Alexis assembles a cast of characters that champion the essential strength of girlhood. Their nude figures charge defiantly onward -  bare and prepared. Their unapologetic frivolity is their armor. Feathered hats, high heels, and ribbon-like bridles, protect these riders as they confront the unknown with the strength that comes only from vulnerability.

In Relume, Alexis reflects on the compulsion to adorn personal spaces. The pieces function as medallions imbued with the power of unforgiving curiosity in the face of change. It’s a chance to harness the solace of the present before venturing into the unknown.

You can find Alexis Taylor’s work at IG: @goldiegoat or www.herakin.org