Sep. 06, 2006 - Issue #568: Sex in the City
Inspiration found in and out of A New Kind of Beauty
Strangely, in the midst of such despair something amazing often happens. Suddenly, out of nowhere—the blue sky, I suppose—inspiration descends. And that’s what happened to young artist Alexis Robb as she was preparing for her show of photography, A New Kind of Beauty.
Robb was feeling very tired and rushed in the months before her show. She was juggling courses at the U of A, where she is enrolled as a full-time student, and managing her thriving photography business.
“I was overwhelmed with all the stuff I had to do,” she sighs and recalls how ideas simply dried up. Then, one night, she got out of bed to get a glass of water from the kitchen. And there, in the middle of her kitchen table was a bouquet of mixed field flowers that her fiancée had given her. She had passed by this bouquet many times in the day, but this time was completely different.
“Maybe it was the way the moonlight was shining on them,” muses Robb. Perhaps in the silence of the late evening she finally slowed down long enough to fully appreciate a tender gift from someone she loved. She isn’t quite sure what happened, but suddenly Robb saw the flowers, really saw them as she had never seen them before. So, still in her pyjamas, she grabbed a camera, and armed with a bunch of lenses, she began to shoot pictures that took her ever so close to the flowers. It was like a moment of intense intimacy when you get really close to the face of another person.
“Only when we are really intimate with people do we get that close,” recalls Robb with awe. “It was almost like smelling another person’s breath. Sometimes I was an inch away.”
And at this distance, peering through her zoom lens, she saw things she had never perceived with the naked eye: textures of petals folded and wrinkled like skin, ominous anthers appeared like rutted grenades, and at the centres of flowers the stigma dissolved into a dark vortex—like a black hole at the centre of a galaxy.
Late into the night, Robb had taken hundreds of pictures, but she was energized and not ready to sleep just yet.
“I was so full of energy and adrenaline—it was almost like I was bungee jumping,” she recalls laughing.
She ran upstairs anxious to load her treasures into the computer. Instinctively and without premeditation, she overlapped different flowers and blended parts in a way she only later realized was reminiscent of the intermarriage of two races, a natural association for Robb whose small nephew is part Oriental and part Caucasian. And, of course, the flowers she was uniting—as if in marriage—had been given to her by her fiancée.
“I don’t think I went to bed that night,” exclaims Robb, as she recalls what she now refers to as her “night of epiphany.”
Her enthusiasm is more than understandable. After a dry spell, when inspiration seemed out of reach, it took only one night and a single vase of flowers lit by a kitchen bulb to create enough intensely felt work to fill many shows. V
To Sep 30
A New Kind of Beauty
By Alexis Robb
The Gallery at Milner,
(Stanley A Milner Library)
Opening reception Thu, Sep. 7 (5 - 8 pm)
New comments for this entry have been turned off and any existing ones are hidden. We apologize for any inconvenience.
