Lexi Arrietta (she/they) is a mixed media artist whose work deals with absence, grief, madness, and memory, with the ways in which we try to compensate for loss and compartmentalize wilderness. Their practice is rooted in personal history and early recollections, in examining coping mechanisms and the emotional relics of things not had. She is interested in the inevitable growth and change that take place during periods of neglect, withdrawal, loss, or estrangement -- in those innermost workings that age adjacent to us, in their own way, and often grow up to be hard lodged and hard-to-recognize versions of themselves. 

 

Lexi's work relies heavily on nature -- as source and subject, and as prompt and catalyst. Her abstract pieces are often patterned after phases of growth, infestation, and decay, drawing comparisons between the wilderness of nature and the wilderness of the mind. Their practice reckons with notions and feelings of ferality and transience; of how individual trauma or instability can move us to the outskirts of shared society, marking us, and drawing us nearer to a metaphorical wood's edge, where the dividing line between nature and culture becomes shaky and blurred.