Project Room: It Ain’t About the Weather: Alexandria Couch
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RHODES is pleased to present It Ain’t About the Weather, a solo exhibition by American artist Alexandria Couch.
This marks the artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery, following her inclusion in the group exhibition Imprint and her recent presentation of monoprints with RHODES Editions at the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair.
Working across drawing, printmaking and textile, Couch constructs images that resist resolution. Her compositions often centre figures of colour who appear and recede within layered environments. In It Ain’t About the Weather, a new series spanning works on paper and woven tapestries, Couch continues her exploration of perception and the instability of the image. Figures emerge only partially, dissolving into their surroundings or pressing forward from them. The body is never fixed; it shifts between presence and absence, suggesting identity as something continually formed through experience and perception.
The exhibition is rooted in the artist’s own reflections on memory and self-narration. “In the record-keeping of my own life,” Couch writes, “I find myself to be quite the unreliable narrator… I am always alone, yet simultaneously in the company of multitudes.” The title recalls a conversation with a friend during the period in which the works were made. For the artist, moving between memory, dream and the present requires what she describes as a condition of multiplicity—being in more than one place at once. The works reflect on the distortions that arise through this process, where perception shapes how we understand both ourselves and others.
Couch’s engagement with textile is also grounded in personal history. On her maternal side, the artist is descended from ancestors who were enslaved in the American South, on a plantation where her mother was later born and worked in the late 1960s and 70s. Within this lineage, quilting functioned as both necessity and expression. Many of the quilts in the exhibition are composed from saved or worn fabrics, materials that carry traces of previous lives. Through their reuse, the works create quiet links between past and present.
Within this body of work, tapestry extends the language of drawing. Threads act as lines, and woven surfaces hold the marks of revision and return. Translating imagery into textile slows the image, allowing it to unfold through processes historically tied to labour and care. In this sense, quilting becomes both record and possibility—an act of remembering that also gestures toward forms yet to emerge.
Across the exhibition, Couch proposes that identity is shaped not only by circumstance but by perception and choice. Through the act of looking we draw conclusions; through the act of seeing we allow other meanings to emerge. When certainty begins to falter, imagination steps in. As the artist suggests, when we cannot trust what we see, we begin to imagine what might follow—and when we cannot trust ourselves in conversation, we talk about the weather.
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Selected works
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Collecting
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