b. 1976 Potsdam, New York

 

Serio is Professor of Art at the University of Texas at Tyler and serves as Art Editor of The Wallace Stevens Journal. She received her B.F.A. in painting from Syracuse University and her M.F.A. in painting from the University of Pennsylvania, where she was awarded the Charles Addams Memorial Prize. Serio has an extensive exhibition record that includes shows at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in Japan, the Martin Museum of Art at Baylor University, and the Wichita Falls Museum of Art in Texas. Her work has appeared alongside artists such as Andy Warhol and Richard Diebenkorn in a show at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts. Serio’s paintings can be found in many private and public art collections around the nation, including Houston Airports (Houston, Texas), Aramark Headquarters (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), and Lankenau Hospital (Wynnewood, Pennsylvania). New Perennials Publishing (Middlebury, Vermont) recently published the book: Perennial Earth: Poetry by Wallace Stevens and Paintings by Alexis Serio which pairs over thirty of Serio’s paintings with an equal number of Stevens' poetry. 

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ARTIST STATEMENT

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"My abstract landscapes are metaphors of time, memory, and perception. I think of my paintings as heirloom (reminiscence), folktale (universal story), and haiku (landscape expressing surprising but profound sensations and concepts). My paintings are responses to the transience of light, especially as witnessed most dramatically at sunrise and sunset, in moving water, and in the light cast over grand vistas. They are formal but also theoretical investigations of the visual perception of light and color, the personal experience of remembering and inventing, and the natural elusiveness of time. 

 

Paintings with titles such as The Honeysuckle Bloom, The Water Owns Your Heart, Clouds Are Legend, and Shimmering at Rainfall invite viewers to recall (or imagine) a time or place that once was—or could be. Deep space and moving light create a sense of longing, a wistfulness, as I seek to describe the indescribable, to capture the ephemeral, to provide form for amorphous feeling. Although I do not provide a foothold beyond a horizon line or a particular palette, viewers usually recognize a place or moment in time they have experienced. Through the execution of illusion and abstraction, I cultivate the personal experience of remembrance." 

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