Artist Statement

Alex Howey’s work conjures worlds where gender is a fluid action rather than a fixed state, depicting queerness as a perpetual metamorphosis. Rooted in androgyny and defiance, their figures drift through liminal realms shaped by linseed oil’s slippery autonomy and metal’s sculptural gravity. In this friction between softness and steel, Howey lays bare the contradictions of gender and desire: tender, unyielding, forged yet ephemeral. Through the embrace of filmic fragmentation, disembodiment, and nonlinear storytelling, they tend a landscape where queer bodies erupt, detach, and reassemble in resistance to dominant norms. Drawing from nomadic queer cultures and rural living, they craft satirical yet unsettling worlds reflecting post-climate change realities. Drawing from Old Masters, Howey reimagines historical depictions through a queer lens, resisting victimhood and celebrating joy, absurdity, and gender performativity. Howey’s work envisions liberated futures – worlds caught between destruction and renewal – these heterotopias becoming sites of satire and joy, where absurdity meets critique, and liberation grows from the soil of conflict.