Lexi Strauss


NEWS

Hello from Earthworm, The Lady Doctors and Clown Choir!
After an intense period of clown/ fool training, my practice now encompasses absurdist performance and curated comedy cabaret style events that celebrate the sacred state of idiocy within community.

Stryxshop are now stocking my prints and MEATOO jewellery- https://www.stryxshop.co.uk/shop/lexi-strauss-/31

Thank you Arts Council England and the Elmley Foundation for awarded funding to research the relationship between trauma and humour

'Tupperware Party' and 'Hostess' now on permanent display at the New Hall Art Collection, Cambridge University.

STATEMENT
Narratives seeking out absurdity and subversion may hold insightful keys, since truths are often grasped in their transition from nonsense. Thus, subjects within the paintings sometimes appear humanely clown-like, often displaying both a rigid facade and a vulnerable persona.

In addition to the core painting practice, diverse recorded conversations are sometimes performed using a ‘verbatim’ (documentary) acting process to engage with people in depth.

Arising from interviews and imagination, specious, fluid narratives subliminally weave works together in order to explore the idea of individuation and complex human relationships with belief systems.

Paintings are also occasionally ventriliquised in order to tell stories. Playfully theatrical installations using projections allow objects or subjects within the imagery to breath, speak and sing collectively or as individuals.

Clown/ trickster performance enables deeper development of narrative elements, whilst simultaneously promoting our innate playful natures over ‘The (too often rarified) Arts’.

I feel honoured to work directly with the profundity of laughter, experiencing the in-person delivery role of Freud’s ‘Die Witzige Einkleidung’- the joke as envelope that conceals psychic messages. For me, this expands activist opportunities for potant metamorphosis of diverse spaces, with a wider audience beyond art-world contexts.