COMBINE 2012: Annual Undergraduate Student Exhibition

As contemporary art becomes increasingly intellectualized and concept-heavy, Alexis Rourke’s loose, instinctive, non-representational painting is a refreshing shift in focus from idea to emotion. For Rourke, painting is a deeply personal, almost meditative process that is informed not only by aesthetics but also by music and performance. Through a spontaneous and automatic exploration of the medium of paint, Rourke aesthetically documents her emotional experience.

Stuck in the Middle was painted during a time of extreme highs and lows for the artist, and the title of the work indicates the constraint of the emotional middle ground she was trying to achieve through the intensely self-reflective ritual of painting. Rourke prefers to paint in large scale precisely because of the temperamental nature of her approach. When dealing with intense emotions, the artist says that small canvases limit the extent of her ability to explore and express. Like a dancer needing the whole stage to perform, Rourke says that her body cannot be limited by the size of her canvas. At four by five feet, Stuck in the Middle represents a space where Rourke has been able to let out her creative beast without feeling confined by the scale of her work surface. 

Rourke notes her purposeful division of Stuck in the Middle into three horizontal sections, following a classical formula for spatial division in landscape painting. A colourful village of shapes at the bottom recedes into warm brown, red and yellow hilly forms, and beyond the horizon a purple, green, orange, and blue sunset stretches across a Technicolor sky. This fictional landscape is created through an extremely organic process of emotional mapping. By experimenting with different shapes, colours, textures, and brush strokes, Rourke is guided through the canvas by her own artistic instinct. 

As revelatory as this work is for the artist, it is impossible for the viewer to determine what, exactly, she is revealing.  Because of the highly personalized nature of aesthetic evaluation, the distance between the artist and the viewer can be vast and polarized. Given Rourke’s nonspecific use of form, there are infinite possibilities for the way her visual language is interpreted by her audience. Rourke is highly aware of the space between the wall and the viewer, and her consciousness of this incongruity is itself a part of her inner journey.  In pursuit of deeper truths about herself, Rourke says that being aware of life’s many camera angles is key: there is the artist’s perception of the artwork, there is the viewer’s perception of the artwork, and somewhere in the middle, there is the truth.