An Interview with Alexis Dirks
by Erica Mendritzki
In the studio, Alexis Dirks flips through vintage magazines and old books, pulling out images of beautiful things: landscapes, eyelashes, gemstones. Using masking tape, toothpicks and chucks of clay, she assembles these cuttings into fragile sculptures and photographs them, creating smooth images of fragmented pictures. These are works thatare both plain-speaking and beguiling—photographs that reveal how beauty is constructed, even as they put us under its spell.
Alexis grew up in Winnipeg and graduated with an Honours BFA from the University ofManitoba in 2006. She and I met in 2007, when we were both living in Scotland and Alexis was working towards her MFA at the Glasgow School of Art. This fall, our paths crossed again. I had just moved to Winnipeg to teach at the U of M, and Alexis was in town for a few months. We shared a studio while she was here, and it was wonderful to have the chance to reconnect with her and to see how she goes about making images. Now she is living in Yellowknife. When I interviewed her via gchat in March, I began by asking her what she could see out of her window.
Alexis: I’m facing the street, so there are at least eight homes within view. My favourite house has this huge picture window with massive plants in front of it. It’s so nice to see all this green when everything else is frozen. It takes so long for anything to grow here—I’m sure the plants in that house are a couple decades old. They’re all wild. I wish I could live in that room with those plants!
Erica: Do you think that this longing for greenery and warmth will find its way into your work?
Alexis: I think that it could, yes. I’ve been thinking about shelter a lot these days. Going back and forth between comfort and discomfort. It’s so comfortable indoors here, and if you want to go outside you have to put a lot of time and effort into preparing for it, because the cold is so brutal. I guess that’s true of Winnipeg as well. But Winnipeg is much more urban. Here it’s all lake and forest, and you’re really aware of the elements.
Erica: So to survive, you have to bring some of the comfort of the indoors to the outdoors. Do you think your work reverses the process, by taking the idea of a wild
landscape and domesticizing and interiorizing it?
Alexis: Yes...there’s something interesting about houseplants as a kind of stand-in for thelandscape. Like a fragment from the outdoors that exists under a new set of conditions and relies on our care to stay alive! I am interested in this idea of a fragmented landscape, which is why I often take found pictures of nature and re-photograph them. They become disconnected from their origin.
Erica: In the studio, along with books of landscape imagery, you had all these old issues of Seventeen Magazine.
Alexis: Oh yeah, those were so great. I had to be careful not to tear them up too much, since my mom wasn’t all that keen on me using them. Had to make careful selections.
Erica: Oh, that’s funny! Did you give them back to her before leaving Winnipeg?
Alexis: Yes. She saved them for so many years, and wasn’t willing to let me have them just to cut up! I’ve looked for old women’s magazines online and they cost a fortune! I’d love to get my hands on some old Vogue magazines from the 60s and 70s. I bet the editorials are pretty great.
Erica: Why are you particularly interested in vintage women’s magazines?
Alexis: I think it’s probably less to do with the content, and more about the compositionsin the photography, the colours, just the feeling of another era.
Erica: Do you think there is some kind of connection between the way femininity isportrayed in those old magazines and the way you use landscape? A kind of nostalgic
idealization?
Alexis: Yes. I think photography often aims to capture an ideal—at least, in the kinds ofphotos I want to work from. Whether it’s the perfect sunset, or the best set of false eyelashes.
Erica: How is that idealism transformed in your work?
Alexis: I think that by reproducing an image of some kind of idealized landscape or picture of femininity, attention is drawn to its falseness. It’s not my picture of those idealisms, it’s my picture of a picture that I found. I want my photographs to be self-conscious of the fact that they are a second-hand viewing of an existing picture. They’re about the act of looking.
Erica: How have the different places you’ve lived—Winnipeg, Glasgow, and now Yellowknife—affected your practice?
Alexis: My work changes based on the materials I am able to access. In Glasgow and Winnipeg there were lots of resources at my disposal—art supply stores, printing labs, and second hand book stores—but here in Yellowknife it’s very limited. I’m trying to work with what’s available to me now. I’m using a combination of found organic materials and more utilitarian items I might find in hardware stores. My work doesn’t reference a single location or landscape, but still, there are elements of my specific environment that end up coming through.
Erica Mendritzki is an artist and educator who lives and works in Winnipeg. When shewas an undergrad, one of her profs said, “The most successful artists I know are the ones who are the most resourceful.” That observation has stayed with her and strikes her as particularly true of Alexis Dirks.