alex krales: Feminine Relief

The imagery I produce addresses my experience as a female-bodied individual. The expression of my life realized in woodcut prints span the entirety of my imagined human life cycle from birth to death. There are times i must have other eyes to guide me to the wells of the waters of my mind.

Currently I have been meditating on how we as a society and I as an individual understand and act in the event of birth and death. Our being born from another, from a female is primary for all. I know my existence is a product of another human, myself constructed in relation to my mother. She began to think of me and how she would be once i was here. If I had not arrived she would have still been momma to my sister. I did come though. Once i arrived it would be a few more years until i had enough practice to store memory of my own. Too busy trying to sit up and focus my eyes.
In this way the formulation of myself began before I physically arrived in the world and I believe will continue after I leave in the form of memory.

Through the creation of woodcuts and the process of tearing apart and piecing them back together as larger scale collages I will encourage viewers to enter to a surreal world infused with personal experience and political commentary. These collages could entirely made up of proofs of one image that through a variety of assemblages create an environment infused with the subject matter of that one original image. I have been printing with mostly black and white on recycled paper. By recycled I mean that I am printing over old drawings, etchings or found pieces of paper. For I find that the more history I associate with the image the easier it is for me to utilize. Many of my subjects appear in multiple pieces, reincarnated with different stories yet all related within the same general subject matter. I am challenged by my desire to simultaneously highlight the consistency of my subjects without giving the impression that I am trying to convey a distinct narrative of events.

Theories below are the first authors I have encountered that are able to articulate the multiplicity that exists in a single person that I try to convey in my visual work. Death is the end of our consciousness. This understanding is key to having an idea of an individual definition of myself. If I am sure to end then I can be sure of the existence of my beginning, middle and the reality of the present. Jean Paul Sartre and Helen Cixous’s ﬁction writing demonstrates the importance of life in the context of death. I find her metaphors that speak simultaneously about birth and death through personal experience useful to my individual pursuit of grasping my life cycle. Cixous concept of “the Third body” is the birth of another consciousness that springs forth from the dynamic of those who were once two separate existences. This ever-changing combination of two that makes a third is not an additional entity or something outside of oneself but what I become when I am interacting with another. The Third body is what I know as the birth of a dynamic between any two people where by being in proximity to another we adapt and slightly change. This Third collects and dissipates, is born and dies with the coming together and separating of any combination of people. I found this Third to be incredibly useful concept for understanding specific experiences and larger social political dynamics. These Third bodies are exponentially distorted due to the systematic separations we embody and proliferate. The knowledge of ourselves as the present state of a trajectory self (lineage) through a larger history informs and helps to sustain a complex web of social dynamics. The present past and future selves are not fully understood and are at odds with the pervasive ideology that dictates concepts of defined selves based on shallow social arc-types. Instead of building on shaky foundations I must try to clear the fog so I may live in and act upon the grievances I see that inhibit me from understanding others and myself.