Description

With a soft gaze and an eye for just enough detail, Lexie Loader paints interior and exterior spaces. Her paintings explore the relationships we have with memories, places, and objects. They bring the mundane and ordinary to life with a glow of familiar light tempered by melancholic undertones.   Loader paints the corners of rooms as intimate portraits of the spaces she has spent time in. The subject matter is personal but universal – a freshly stacked dishrack, an unmade bed, or a half-used tube of toothpaste resting above a shiny bathroom sink. The moments framed by her paintings are casual and devoid of people, yet they remind the viewer of the daily rituals we form in the places where we ourselves have lived. They trigger nostalgia for those places and the memories we’ve made within them. They leave space for us to enter and remember.   Using a predominantly high-key color palette, she favors lighter tones that convey a sense of optimism. Appearing to be lit by a bright overhead light or a nearby window on a very sunny day, this creates a tension with the shadows in each composition, as if some parts of the scene are vividly remembered but not others. Purples and greens swim beneath the surface of blushing porcelain sinks, kitchen tiles, and bookshelves. Faint pencil marks leave traces of a compositional plan, as if we can watch her trying to recall an object’s placement in the room. The perspectives, colors, and marks in each painting are slippery and elusive much as our personal memories evolve over time. Bathed in warm light and cool shadows, these works investigate the narratives of quiet and forgotten scenes. -Erika Diamond