Exhibition - False Azure: New Drawings by Meg Alexander

Meg Alexander is drawn to the complex beauty of the natural world: a wave, a blossoming flower, a beaver dam decaying. Alexander’s observation and consideration of these singular moments allows her work to deeply explore the duality embedded in nature. Her medium may vary from graphite to India ink to color pencil, but her ability to capture the stunning flux of life is consummate. In her current body of work, Alexander has chosen to focus on moments of unintentional harm. False Azure is a reference to Vladimir Nabokov’s poem in his novel Pale Fire:

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

By the false azure in the windowpane;

I was the smudge of ashen fluff—

and I Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

In her recent work, Alexander explores the literal collision between the human and the natural work. Birds are attracted to the false azure reflected in domestic windows, and as a result collide into human space and die. Alexander’s lovingly depicted grisaille drawings of these birds express the duality of her subject matter: imagination and reality, intentional and unintentional harm, life and death. This act of drawing memorializes and honors the constancy of loss, thus leaving a personal expression of beauty to fill the void.

The exhibition carefully examines the abstract force of the false azure, and its mortal attraction to the innocent birds. Alexander skillfully connects these disparate images, one delicate and vulnerable and the other hard and cold, so that they become visually linked in our minds. Building on this theme of unintentional harm, Alexander’s largest work of the exhibition is a two-panel drawing with Falling Birds on the left and Streamers on the right. The birds are falling to their death due to the arrays of solar heat, evaporating as they fall becoming unified with the azure of the sky.

Meg Alexander is a visual artist whose work is based in drawing. Alexander creates images and objects that are inspired by natural forms and systems. She is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. She has received awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and was an Alumni/ae Traveling Fellow from SMFA/Tufts University. Meg exhibits regularly in Boston and New England, and her work is included in many private and corporate collections throughout the world. She lives and works in Concord, Massachusetts.

The exhibition will run through Saturday October 12th.