Alexandra Carter‘s current show, “All gods are hot,” is a maze of artworks so tightly packed that one can hardly turn around without colliding with translucent paintings adorning the walls and hanging from the ceiling at Radiant Space. Even so, cramped quarters seem airy for ambient light diffusing through drafting film surfaces painted with flowing imagery of chimerical humanoids in shape-shifting states of flux. Inspired by mythology, fairytales and female surrealists, Carter’s urbanely vagarious paintings address cross-cultural spiritual and existential paradoxes. Delicate detail, idealized beauty and soft translucence belie scenes of trauma, aberration and disgust. Bodily fluids burst from corporeal confines as bestial appendages mysteriously emerge from sphinxes and sirens in pieces such as Holy oil’s Thunder (2018) and Cabinet of the Solar Plexuses (2017). So graceful are Carter’s brushwork and stylization that even fleshly seepage assumes curious elegance. Carter’s pigment and imagery frequently allude to her Massachusetts cranberry farm upbringing. Vaccininum Macrocarpon (Cranberry Bosom-Room) (2017) depicts its titular fruits as pathologically multitudinous, balloonlike breasts. In a series of fanciful, washy drawings on linen napkins and handkerchiefs, rust-red cranberry juice takes on new life as blood or vomit; berry juice becomes goddesses’ ichor. Across cultures throughout history, gods and goddesses are often portrayed as embodying human characteristics, conveniently enabling the deification of people while symbolically reducing divinities to the stature of mere mortals that can’t even control their own corporeal secretions, much less halt the temporal degradation of their bodies. Fascination overwhelms repulsion as Carter beckons us to ponder the strangeness of being human.

Radiant Space
1444 N. Sierra Bonita Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90046
Show runs through Jun. 23