OREM, Utah — The works of artist Alexandra Giannell are on display at the UVU Museum of Art beginning January 10 in an exhibit titled Peripheral Terrains, exploring the dualistic relationships between internal and external, restriction and liberation.

Gianell’s creations allude to the topographical landscapes and architectural structures of historical and contemporary socially institutionalized implementations of displacement, incarceration, and genocide. Her use of additive and subtractive indexical mark-making approaches embeds the physicality of the making body as well as suggest its absence.

“Through this lens, investigations of what it is to be in our body — aligned with our own centrality, an inward, internal location — are juxtaposed with the simultaneous reach to the periphery, speaking to the limitations of our perceived existence as well as to the possibilities of afterlife or infinity,” Gianell said.

Giannell is currently an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing in the Department of Art and Design in the School of the Arts at Utah Valley University. She also spent several years residing in Europe, interweaving phenomenological discussions of vision, perception, and identity into her painting and drawing practice. Her work has been the recipient of multiple grants and awards, including the Florita Eichel Memorial Purchase Award from the Evansville Museum of Art, History + Sciences in Indiana in 2020 and the Foy Gilmore Goodwyn Memorial Award from the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in 2019.

Peripheral Terrains will run from January 10 to March 19 at the UVU Museum of Art. Click here to view the exhibit digitally.