Alexa Burrell
FREE and Open to the Public | In Person + Livestream
Alexa Burrell was born in San Francisco, CA. She is an experimental collage artist who weaves together field recordings, video composites, projections, animations, sculptures and archival materials to create lush fantastical and evocative narratives that compare the emotional and material, natural and technological, and scientific and spiritual.
Alexa is a musician with a solo project LEXAGON. Her music brings an afro-futurist sonic mirage of sound- weaving together enchanting vocals, clarinet, field recordings and handmade instruments. Inspired by female jazz vocalists and melancholy love songs, her performances incorporate femme ballads with ritualized moments of improvisation and intricate rhythms from unordinary objects such as stovetops and birds. Her music has been described as “ancient, sexy and haunting.” She’s interested in how music activates memory, particularly ancestral trauma and epi-genetics. Music is her vehicle for time-traveling, meditation and intergenerational healing.
Between 2016-2022, Alexa was the documentarian, designer and a performing member of House/Full of Blackwomen- a ritual performance collective directed by amara tabor-smith and Ellen Sebastian-Chang. She has created immersive projection installations and soundscape designs for Bay Area theaters such as Audium Theater of Sound, Stanford University, Dance Mission Theater, ODC, Joe Goode Performance Group, Oakland Theater Project, Centralworks and Counterpulse.
Her work has been shared at Kala Art Institute, Pro Arts Gallery, The Luggage Store Gallery, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, SomArts, Gray Area, Betti Ono Gallery, Ashara Ekundayo Gallery and Eastside Arts Alliance. She is the recipient for the 2018 Soundwave Festival “Buzz Award” for innovation in music. Additionally she received the 2018 Alternative Exposure grant and was nominated for the Isadora Duncan Dance Award in the category of VISUAL DESIGN, for House/Full of Blackwomen: Episode 12: passing/through/the great middle.
Alexa has worked as an artist in residence at Audium Theater of Sound, Kala Art Institute, Montalvo Art Center, and Paul Dresher Studios. She is currently a member of Real Time and Space studios. Alexa lives and works in Oakland.
Photo credit: Barak Shrama
