5 minute read
ALEXANDRA SHERMAN: An Artist With A Message
ALEXANDRA SHERMAN: An Artist With A Message
By Louisa Woodville
In her bright basement studio in Round Hill, Alexandra N. Sherman assembles works of contemplative beauty, working in collage, watercolor, and cartonnage—a malleable stiff fabric similar to papier-mâché
Using 19th and early 20th-century images from magazines, playing cards, books, field guides, and other sources, Sherman arranges the images on top of old-fashioned checking ledgers with numbers carefully scripted into demarcated pages. She creates dream-like imagery evoking remembrances of events long past— or, perhaps, a nostalgia for things that never were.
“Here you can see the watercolor coming into the collages, with painted backgrounds kind of like a diorama,” she said, pointing to a work on a large table.
“This one was influenced by Frederic Edwin Church, his icebergs.”
Church, a 19th-century Hudson River School artist, was renowned for poignant landscapes of mountains, waterfalls, and sunsets. Vivid and haunting—two adjectives that describe Church’s work—aptly describe Sherman’s as well.
The two artists’ modus operandi, however, are vastly different. Sherman uses online resources to locate the hundreds of printed and three-dimensional ephemera she weaves into her works. She then manipulates them with watercolor or gouache, or boxing in an assemblage. In juxtaposing disparate elements, she mingles fantasy and reality, infusing into her works a lyric surrealism. When she neatly frames her images, the results are reminiscent of those by the New York artist and filmmaker Joseph Cornell (1903-1972), whose artfully-arranged boxed images evoke a similar romantic sensibility.
Like Cornell, Sherman features birds in many works—Cornell, in fact, is said to have sprinkled birdseed on his kitchen table to lure them inside. She also uses repeating motifs such as trees, branches, bird-headed popes and other figures pasted onto 19th century ledgers.
Sherman’s recent works, “The Mysteries,” are exhibited at Baltimore’s Blue Gallery. These assemblages consist of images cut out of vintage papers Sherman then pastes onto antique invoices and ledgers.
She cites William Blake (1757-1827), the watercolorist famous for his Romantic Age poetry, as a strong influence, as well as the American painter and photographer Tom Uttech (1942), who, like herself, paints imaginary scenes filled with beating wings and surreal landscapes.
“The Rose Bower” is a case in point. Here, on thorned branches sit a Cedar Waxwing, Mourning Dove, Downey and Red-Bellied woodpeckers, and a wren as well as a rabbit, a field mouse and a chipmunk. They surround a Neoclassically-framed window with red drapery spilling out. Red roses, also with birds, shoot upwards from this same Neoclassical detail.
Sherman and her husband, the writer Paul Hidaglo, have a 9-year-old son, Julian, a fourth grader at Hill School. The daughter of Upperville antique dealers Carol and Dennis Sherman, Alexandra also attended Hill.
She’s a 1994 Foxcroft graduate, then went on to Elon University in North Carolina. Next was the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, followed by an MFA at the University of Wisconsin.
Her work experience includes training at the Bethesda frame ateliers, L’Eclat De Verre, and Gold Leaf Studios in Georgetown, affording her the opportunity to construct elaborate frames, learn conservation methods, and work with gold leaf, a notoriously tricky medium. “Working at that French frame shop got me hooked on papers,” says Sherman. In D.C., she also curated for the Mobil modern art collection and the The Dadian Gallery. She lived in Argentina for a year, where she was struck by the works of Argentinian surrealist Leonor Fini.
Sherman’s upcoming exhibition, opening this spring, is “Weight of the World, a Reckoning.”
“This whole show is about where we are now, because [the works] are literally on reckonings,” she said. “The show will also include some installation work — there will be a couple of thousand butterflies flying through the space.”
In her “Feet to the Fire” exhibition, she juxtaposes the natural world—a stormy sky, swallows, trees, and fire—with human body parts: a single eye and a pulsating heart that dominate the center, under which sprouts a branch with green-leafed balls. Butterflies dance, while further up, swallows orbit around an all-seeing eye reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch’s “Seven Deadly Sins,” painted more than 500 years earlier.
“I love medieval manuscripts and I like to take the whimsey that you see — the marginalia— and that kind of plays into my work,” she said. Sherman’s iconography, initially mysterious, is straightforward when she explains it.
“The eye and heart represent truth —all seeing, and the swallows are a symbol of joy and beauty for me but also a reminder that there are others who are struggling because of our actions too,” she said, adding that she painted the work in response to the Canadian forest fires that filled the air with smoke in Virginia in the summer of 2023.
The work has a serious message. “Our feet (located at the bottom of the work) are to the fire in terms of getting our act together on fixing the climate crisis,” Sherman said. “I’ve been putting all of my grief about the changes happening to the environment into my work. We are more tied to the environment than we think.”
Details: www.ansherman.com and email art@ansherman.com
