Alexa Wheeler

My work begins with objects shaped by use—vessels that hold + withhold, utensils that divide + sustain. I collect these forms as evidence not symbols. Every surface bears residue of touch, work, care. These objects move between bodies and generations, carrying the weight of survival. I work in printmaking, photography, collage, video, and installation, using repetition—inking, wiping, cutting, stitching—as a method of understanding. Returning to a surface, a form, allows meaning to build slowly. I want the labor of making to remain visible and the work to show its seams, friction, decisions. The vessel recurs as a dichotomy. A vessel contains + restricts. It can nourish + confine. Throughout history, women have been treated as vessels—expected to carry lineage, labor, memory, and silence. My work confronts containment while seeking repair. I alter, bind, deconstruct, and reassemble familiar forms to expose the emotional and structural systems they reflect. Process is not just technique, but an ethic. I work slowly, allowing time to surface what has been held or hidden. Through layered impressions and material transformation, I explore how function shapes identity and how inherited structures can be dismantled and rebuilt. My work exposes the labor embedded in daily life and insists that what is dismissed as ordinary carries emotional and political weight, while also making space for care, connection, and the slow work of healing.

Alexa Wheeler is an interdisciplinary artist and mother whose work confronts the charged terrain of women’s labor—its intimacy, endurance, and erasure—through the objects that hold our lives together. She earned her BFA from Pratt Institute and MFA from the University of New Mexico and was trained as a Master Printer at the Tamarind Institute. A professor of fine arts for 20 years, she spent years building spaces for other artists while privately navigating trauma and the demands of caregiving and survival. Her return to her practice is an act of reclaiming a self that once disappeared inside care, silence, and expectation—a return to voice, body, and authorship emerging from the lifelong labor of healing from childhood violence.

Book Arts, Collage/Mixed Media, Digital Art, Drawing, Film/Video, Installation, Multi-Media, Photography, Printmaking/Lithography