Reality Check: Alyana Coverly, Frantz Lexy and Lior Neiger
This November the Annex Gallery exhibit “Reality Check” features the work of Alayna Coverly, Frantz Lexy and Lior Neiger. They are the award winners from “Out of Place,” an international juried show held at Fountain Street in January of 2020. “Reality Check” runs from October 28–November 22, 2020 and will be open for the SoWa First Friday Gallery walk on November 6th from 5–8PM, during gallery hours on Saturday and Sunday from 12–4PM and by appointment. Below the artists share a bit about their ideas and process.
Alayna Coverly
Open about living with depression, my work deals with concepts of vulnerability as a strength, and absence as a presence. Through veiling figures in cloth, I'm creating a weighted presence that can stand alone, or become part of their surroundings. Some of my works are painted with oil in a few sessions, while others have a pattern blocked in first before producing a shadow using a thinning medium. The beginning of the series was directly related to discovering these things about myself while contemplating how it affected my family dynamics. Some of my pieces reference these intimate relationships we have in our lives, and more specifically, the dichotomy between comfort and tension of familial relationships.
Frantz Lexy
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about my role as an artist. What’s the point of hanging pretty pictures on the wall when we’re surrounded by chaos? Why do we need fiction when real life is becoming increasingly bizarre? Am I using my time and energy wisely? As I ask myself these question, I feel an increased need to be honest and vulnerable in my craft. In a world where truth doesn’t seem to exist anymore and reality is collapsing in on itself, I find a new kind of satisfaction when I finish a painting knowing that it expresses exactly how I feel.
Lior Neiger
I have four paintings in "Reality check," a show currently on view at Fountain Street gallery. Each of the paintings has a different background story. Here, I'd like to share the story behind my painting “Falling” and some of my creative process. In 2017, I became interested in painting public statues in my city (Boston) like the “Appeal to The Great Spirit” that is in front to of the Boston MFA or the Columbus statue in the North End that has since been decapitated and removed. Part of my interest revolved around the emerging discussions and protests about the removal of public monuments. I was visiting NYC and since I already painted the Columbus statue in Boston, I wanted to see if I could find an interesting angle or connection with the NYC one. I spent about an hour photographing the statue from various directions and ended up with a few pictures that intrigued me. There was one with the statue in front of a Trump building and another where a crane in the background seemed to be lifting the statue:
After some consideration, I decided to go with a picture that for me, was more enigmatic, where “Columbus” appears to be looking at a LED screen featuring the head of Lady Liberty. For a brief moment, I felt as if they were communicating, and I considered calling the painting, “Instant Crush” after a Daft Punk song (Featuring Julian Casablancas), where in the music video two wax figures seem to uncannily connect:
I eventually decided to call the painting “Falling.” This word captures two things that I see in this image: the physical falling of the statue and the falling in love of the depicted figures. This is what I wrote about this moment: In ”Falling” (2018-Columbus Circle, NYC), Lady Liberty stares out of an LED screen at the leaning statue of Columbus. Her gaze is anxious; can she see something that we don’t? Perhaps, like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, she can see destruction and wreckage piling up. Perhaps she is just staring at Columbus while the lone navigator keels over: Will he soon be part of the wreckage?