Exhibitions
Art Saves Lives - Physically, Emotionally, and Spiritually
Ventura County Art Council’s Atrium Gallery, Ventura, California July 18 - August 27, 2014
This unique exhibit features some 17 artists and 90 artworks that highlight the power of art to heal people, and in many cases to “Save” them literally or figuratively. Their artwork depicts struggles with addictions, depression, abuse, and loss (among many other challenges), but also triumphs and recovery. Unique to this exhibit are the very frank and revealing personal essays by each artist that accompany their artwork. The essays and artwork clearly drive home the importance of art in their lives. While the artists clearly acknowledge the debt they owe to art, they also want to publicly share their stories so that people with similar challenges will know they are not alone.
Language as a Material
Porch Gallery, Ojai, California January 9 - February 6, 2014
Alexandra Cantle’s work is inspired by her personal experience with dyslexia. Through community engagement that focuses on exchanging stories with other dyslexics, Cantle creates works on paper that highlight the feelings of shame, doubt, isolation, and triumph that result from the living with language-based disabilities. Using language as a material, Cantle interprets the internal struggle to communicate feelings. As an interactive process-based element of this show, Cantle invited artist Tamarind Rossetti to lead a project working with language as material. Rossetti works with types of communication that explore emotional and physical space, internal and external language, and the intricacies of memory.
“I stood with a couple of friends in front of the piece, “Process,” a 4-paneled piece which shows the distorted word. My friend could not shake the frustration of wanting a 5th panel to show the word pristine and perfect, “like it should be.” I informed her that that was what the artist intended.” - Demitri Corbin
“Alexandra Cantle expresses through art what it is like to have a barrier in language. Discovering what she was experiencing was in fact dyslexia... She takes the discovery and empowers herself- not the disability. It’s beautiful and the space is captivating.” - Jolene
Drawing on Dyslexia: Laboring Through Language
A Mess and a Pleasure: Practicing In Public For Your Art, Los Angeles, California May 2013
With personal experience from the effects that having dyslexia and personal knowledge about altered self-value, I began using my art practice as a way to simulate my experience with written language. This work also became a method to convey my emotional experience to others.
My art practice creates awareness of this relationship through organizing community engagements, exchanging stories, and producing works on paper, methods that serve to shift the cycle between self-value and societal-value around literary based knowledge. Focused on working with the dyslexic community, I lead workshops, have conversations, and create drawings, to generate critical self-awareness. This work focuses on the relationship between the psychological effects and lasting impact the dyslexia experience has on people, more specifically, the feelings of deeply rooted shame, doubt, inadequacy, and isolation that result from society valuing of written language-based intellect above other forms of knowledge.
