This past Monday, amidst a bit of precarious, brisk wind, I sat down with artist Alezendria Decking on a suncast lawn at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to chat a little bit more with her about her life, her experiences, and her art.
We talked about the hidden imagination in everyday “looking,” how “real” art is all about seeing and observing. It’s about the beauty that comes in and with the artist’s observations to explore the periphery of what is often so commonplace and obvious to them that becomes the moment or a glimpse in time, paintings that include a lifeblood of beauty, humor, intelligence, surprise, spectacle, curiosity, and the clarity that comes with contemplation and introspection.
Lit upon the walls of ada gallery at 228 West Broad St, Richmond, illuminated figures glow from within. Someplace, a woman is sitting in the upstairs bathroom with the window open, smoking a cigarette, watching an early snowfall from some of the first winter flakes, trying to hide her habit, and already, all along, knowing that everybody — her family, and coworkers, and friends — somehow previously knew.
Someone somewhere else is watching someone with a pair of binoculars. It’s the young boy sitting at his school desk leaning forward as the blonde girl with silver-rimmed glasses in front of him takes her test. In They Don’t Even Try to Hide it Anymore, it is so obviously normal and apparent that the young, naive teenager is trying to cheat.
In Night Feed, on another wall, in the back-left corner, a mother feeds her newborn baby some fresh, warm milk. Adjacent, in Don’t Take it Too Bad, an intensely pensive man in a black and blue-rimmed green baseball cap watches nervously the prize fight on the television, his money gripped tightly in the palm of his left hand, and grimacing, distracted from the outcome of defeat, the stale heat.
Next, a Long Distance Runner, nonchalant and aloof, runs between the pine trees a little further along the path, seemingly unaware of the Big Bad Wolf or a man dressed in wolf’s clothing hovering quietly, sinisterly waiting in the expanse by the red-brick house in the woods behind her.
Everywhere, all over, the illuminated radiance of the quiet, private, figures gleam. One can see this so clearly in the way that Alezendria uses color. I was personally drawn to Locker Room — a piece across the gallery from Long Distance Runner that includes these beautifully verdant and voluptuous greens, Alezendria’s favorite color — how the checkered-wet tile of the locker room blooms beneath the bright, fluorescent light.
And yet, in other paintings, the figures themselves in the collection “Who’s Watching, if Not You?” aren’t always caught smiling. Some are seemingly seen to be brooding in an act of some silent, self-aware, secretly, potentially questioning expression of what one can often feel, sometimes maybe taking the moment for granted, between those times where we find the miraculous in the mundane and beauty in an everyday thing.
“It’s about elongation of figure and how you can idealize or stylize a person not so realistically,” Alezendria explained to me. It’s how, in some paintings, “the hands reach to each other.” It’s in “the beautiful things that go unnoticed.”
Lastly, and which ought not go unnoticed, displayed by the front window and on pedestals amidst the magnificent vignettes into the periphery of a realty-based but imaginative, illuminated world, the visitor also finds a set of ceramic magazine covers, versions of Alezendria’s paintings imagined as depictions on the covers of LIFE, objects she made as a part of her residency work with the Visual Arts Center of Richmond from November 2024 to May 2025.
“It’s a nice thing whenever you have an idea…It can have to do with the current timing or it can just be something silly,” she told me. We smiled and laughed in agreeance about the humor and usefulness in the utilitarian act of letting the LIFE cover that she keeps in her apartment serve as a coaster. Her art is fun, quirky, and playful, examining the parts about a life that is appreciated, observed, and lived.
Alezendria Decking is a Brazilian-American artist and comes from a small mountain town in Pennsylvania known as Freeland, the highest point in the area. She says she “learned improvisation from her dad,” a baker and woodsman and that perhaps her love for woodworking and building flourished from him. She learned her work ethic from her Brazilian mother who stands as a reason for Alezendria to keep pursuing being an artist even though it can be difficult at times. In second grade, she was always the kid who was painting and she learned from an early age the personal way she liked to draw people and their faces. There’s no way to miss the beauty of life in them.
Make sure to follow Alezendria on social media @alezendria and learn more about her work and future events at her website alezendriadecking.com
Main image: Alezendria Decking, Last Call for Boarding, acrylic on canvas
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