Sasha Alexandra

Sasha Alexandra and Marina Kassianidou: Beyond the Real
February 18 – April 22, 2023
Reception: Saturday, February 18, from 5-7 pm with Marina Kassianidou in attendance. An artist talk with Kassianidou will commence at 5:30p, coinciding with the reception.

(Marfa, TX) RULE Gallery is pleased to present Beyond the Real, an exhibition pairing two Colorado- based artists, Sasha Alexandra and Marina Kassianidou, at our location in Marfa, TX. The show will be on view from February 18 – April 22. A public reception will be held on Saturday, February 18, from 5- 7p, and includes an artist talk with Marina Kassianidou at 5:30p.

Sasha Alexandra and Marina Kassianidou are two art practitioners whose works and processes resist and recalibrate traditional associations of the terms “art” and “practice.” Originally trained as a potter, Alexandra’s current experimentation in ceramic sculpture, drawing, and video transforms sensorial experiences from the physical to the virtual realm. Themes of tactility, permanence, and the glazed surface produce ‘echoes of the real’— visual and auditory experiences that narrate repetitive actions of a specific time and place. Kassianidou incorporates the materials found in her immediate environment into her paintings, drawings, collages, and installations that are aesthetically concerned with the exchange between marks and surfaces. Both artists deploy a range of processes to create multi- hyphenate works that stimulate critical thought and profound wonder through experiential relations with art objects and the spaces they occupy.

In her Marfa presentation, Alexandra highlights the tension between the physical and virtual by featuring an interactive tabletop installation entitled Interiority Complex, inviting visitors to directly investigate the tactile sensations of her Velcroed ceramic pieces. Nearby are her videos Brick and Haul, which showcases the artist handling the objects in various ways. Both videos are filmed on a green screen, enticing us to question what we perceive as real while also exploring concepts of voyeurism, play, labor, veracity, and consumption.

Kassianidou transforms her exhibition space into a site-responsive installation using bass wood as a medium. The resulting three-dimensional drawing echoes the existing architecture of the room on which the artist will mount reductive collage works from her series, Dotted Lines. In these collages, Kassianidou achieves similar ends by overwriting the lines on ruled paper with hole-punched dots of the same material, ultimately assembling marks that are nearly indiscernible without closer inspection. The work resists categorization by deconstructing the forms of the surface they rest upon. This aspect disorients the function of an exhibition setting and conflates conventional understandings of public and private space.

Through bridging formal and philosophical perspectives, Beyond the Real considers where real art experiences happen in the present day: in-person or via a screen. The exhibition as a whole engages with ideas about the present conventions of the art market and the layered discourses it engenders. Per art historian Boris Groys, “Artists have required the right to make sovereign decisions regarding the content and the form of their work beyond any explanation or justification vis-à-vis the public.”