ARTIST STATEMENT
My work begins with objects shaped by use—vessels that hold + withhold, utensils that divide + sustain. I collect these forms as evidence not symbols. Every surface bears residue of touch, work, care. These objects move between bodies and generations, carrying the weight of survival. I work in printmaking, photography, collage, video, and installation, using repetition—inking, wiping, cutting, stitching—as a method of understanding. Returning to a surface, a form, allows meaning to build slowly. I want the labor of making to remain visible and the work to show its seams, friction, decisions. The vessel recurs as a dichotomy. A vessel contains + restricts. It can nourish + confine. Throughout history, women have been treated as vessels—expected to carry lineage, labor, memory, and silence. My work confronts containment while seeking repair. I alter, bind, deconstruct, and reassemble familiar forms to expose the emotional and structural systems they reflect. Process is not just technique, but an ethic. I work slowly, allowing time to surface what has been held or hidden. Through layered impressions and material transformation, I explore how function shapes identity and how inherited structures can be dismantled and rebuilt. My work exposes the labor embedded in daily life and insists that what is dismissed as ordinary carries emotional and political weight, while also making space for care, connection, and the slow work of healing.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Alexa Wheeler is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans printmaking, photography, video, and mixed-media. Her practice examines how everyday objects carry memory, labor, and emotional history. Making is a method of survival and reclamation—an active reshaping of what has been inherited. Trained as a Master Printer at the Tamarind Institute, she works through transfer, repetition, and touch. Printmaking shapes her philosophy: nothing is singular, everything bears an impression, and all materials hold history. Moving between mediums, she collapses boundaries between analog and digital process, seeking layered truths. Domestic objects recur throughout her work as sites of power, inheritance, and survival. They hold the: residue of care, weight of expectation, and architecture of resilience. In recent series exploring women as vessels, Alexa investigates emotional cost of holding—history, grief, devotion—and generational transformation of labor and memory. She is the founder of toastlab (Together | Observe | Acknowledge | Share | Transform), a mobile studio that brings printmaking and fabrication to women and survivors outside institutional access. She holds an MFA from University of New Mexico and a BFA from Pratt Institute. She is a Principal Lecturer III in Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico, a 2025 Fulcrum Fund awardee, a 2026 Artist-in-Residence at Furman University, and a 2026 Vermont Studio Center resident, with a solo exhibition at Harwood Art Center in 2026.
© Alexa Wheeler