Broken Rainbow, 12x15”, mixed media on handmade paper, 2020
The Gallery at CCA starts the new year with an exhibition from Tucson based artist, Lex Gjurasic. Radical Happiness will be on display from January 15 through April 9, 2022.
Radical Happiness is a collection of mixed media works, which Gjurasic created during the 2020 quarantine, incorporating a wide breadth of unconventional materials, using only what she had already at home-from sample house paint to mortar to Styrofoam.
Flowering Mound, 17x17”, mixed media sculpture, 2021
The artist, who finds the process of creating art to be meditative and soothing for her mental health, developed the series to relieve the anxieties and uncertainties of living in a country ravaged by the virus. Through the process, she disappeared into other worlds-amalgamations of imagery existing somewhere between memory and imagination.
"To me Radical Happiness isn't toxic positivity, it is coping. While creating my Flower Mounds series it was like a visual Prozac, keeping me afloat during the pandemic," says Gjurasic. "And when I noticed the levity I felt while making the art spread to those who experienced the work- that was absolute magic."
Flower Mound, 25x36.5”, mixed media on paper, 2020
Gjurasic's commitment to the safety of quarantine was unwavering; she began hand-making paper when her supply of other viable surfaces dwindled. To do this, she used, among other tools, a child's plastic pool. On this delicate paper, she painted rolling hills carpeted with flowers, creating part of the series, Flower Mounds.
Radical Happiness features pieces from the series Flower Mounds which she calls, "a love-letter to the natural world." The pieces draw from Slavic art's reverence for botanicals and a nod to her cultural roots.
"Throughout the creation of this series, I thought often of the delight and solace my Slavic foremothers took in floral motif embroidery on garments, decorated "pisanica" or Easter eggs and traditional Croatian silver filigree jewelry during tremulous times," says Gjurasic.
As the death toll of the pandemic grew over months and then years, so too did the meaning of this body of work. Gjurasic began to see similarities between Flower Mounds and the burial mounds of various global cultures. "Painting mounds of Day-Glo blooms shaped like headstones, I created a new and sacred space for grieving loss."
Join the artist for an in-person opening reception for Radical Happiness on Saturday, January 15, 2022, 4 - 6 p.m. The Gallery at the CCA is located inside the Chandler Center for the Arts, 250 N. Arizona Avenue. Open Monday - Friday, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m., and Saturday, 12 - 5 p.m. Admission is always free.
For more information on Lex Gjurasic's Radical Happiness visit visiongallery.org.
Contact me directly anytime at gjurasicpark@gmail.com
Embrace, 3.5x3.5”, mixed media on found vintage photo, 2021