With Alice
Delphine Lewis

Featured Exhibition: DocNow 2019

Opening Reception: Monday, June 10th 2019, 7-8pm
Exhibition Run: June 10th – 23rd

At the age of fourteen, Alice began exploring the frustrations she faced—as an adolescent, an artist, and a feminist—through her visual art practice. She developed a keen interest in creating experiential installations, translating her own questions concerning community, gender equality, censorship and age discrimination into tangible artworks that her viewers could also experience.

More recently, at sixteen, Alice has turned to painting, performance, and photography to explore her identity, and investigate themes of female representation and iconography. With Alice captures how Alice now negotiates the obstacles she faces as she continues to shape her identity through her artwork. Her profound appreciation for 1930s, 40s and 50s films and novels has led Alice to begin painting women from this era. These portraits blend images of herself with actresses she admires, such as Judy Garland and Corinne Calvet. They personify her ever-shifting personality, each one of them highlighting a quality, whether it be bravery or modesty or something else, that together reflect facets of her complete identity. Alice uses these paintings as reference when she dresses: by personifying the women she paints, she claims agency over both her representation and her own identity.

The portraits of With Alice capture Alice in two states of performance that come naturally to her: as a mid-adolescent artist driven by the obstacles she faces, and as the personified women she paints. Alice lives in a world shaped by her own fantasies and creativity, where her artwork extends beyond her practice into her everyday life, through dress and performance.

Delphine Lewis is a documentary and fashion photographer working in Montreal, Toronto, and New York. With an interest in capturing the bonds that exist between intergenerational family members through portraiture, her practice exists between fact and fiction.

Through analog photography, she’s interested in posed portraiture as the first step toward taking an image. She looks for moments that blend the staged photograph with reality; when a subject becomes a participant. These moments acknowledge the subjective and collaborative nature of image-making. At the core of her practice is her commitment to establishing a reciprocal exchange between herself and her participant.

https://www.delphinelewis.com/