Dreaming with Open Eyes: Alexis Trice and the Ephemeral Wild
In the drifting moments between sleep and wakefulness, images can seem more real than the waking world. It is precisely this hypnagogic territory that the painter Alexis Trice cultivates, populating her canvases with a luminous, feral chosen family of creatures. Her recent body of work invites viewers into a crepuscular realm where fish, hounds, shells, and clouds shimmer like scattered gems, their forms both vivid and on the verge of vanishing.
Trice paints with a delicate yet intense regard that turns these animal-like beings into emotional actors. A fish might appear to weep, a hound to prance in slow motion, a shell to catch light as if breathing. The scenes feel less like fixed narratives and more like fleeting visitations — the kind we might half-remember upon waking and then spend the day trying to recover. There is tenderness here, but also a wildness that resists domestication.
The idea of a “chosen family” runs through the work as more than a motif. These creatures gather not by biological tie but by some deeper, elective affinity. They look out at us with wild eyes, unblinking, as if we have stumbled upon a secret council. Trice’s handling of atmosphere — a hazy, almost liquid twilight — makes the whole ensemble feel suspended in time, a dream you can step into but never fully grasp.
What lingers most is the sense of impermanence. As solid as a hound’s ear or a glistening scale may seem, everything in Trice’s world hints at dissolution. Forms melt into clouds, edges blur, and the image recedes like sand slipping through fingers. That fragility perhaps speaks to a quieter urban longing: for moments of genuine wildness in everyday life, for connections that feel chosen rather than imposed, and for the kind of beauty that asks to be seen before it disappears.
While the artist’s work may not hang in Oxford just yet, it taps into a sensibility recognized by those who frequent independent galleries and quiet corners of the city — an appreciation for art that doesn’t shout, but instead draws you into a shared daydream. Alexis Trice’s hypnagogic menagerie reminds us that sometimes the most compelling company exists just behind the eyelid, waiting for us to drift near enough to see.