Alexei Mansour’s work in “Becoming a Vessel” harnesses the visual grammar of Greco-Roman Antiquity to explore the fluid, amorphous nature of queerness and subjective identity. The artist's work offers visions not of a static time shrouded in myth and legend, but frames the queer homosociality of Antiquity in an exuberant otherworld of symbols that both mirror and transform visual cultures of the past into present realities. Framed in a Dionysian vision and rendered in kaleidoscopic color, archetypal figures are set against a backdrop of Arcadian gardens, inviting viewers into the Heterotopia they inhabit. Amidst the multiplicity of bodies and vessels alike, figures intertwine and mirror each other, promising fluid ways of being in the world. Each coaxes the viewer, and one another, to remember who they once were and imagine who they might become. The artist also asks viewers to imagine themselves embodied as a vessel, a container filled with its own history and ongoing transformations.
Alexei Mansour (b. 1991, USA) is a Philadelphia based artist & photographer. He graduated from Tyler School of Art with a BFA in Painting and Art History minor and is a former member of the artist collective New Boone. He has always been influenced by the rich traditions of his eastern cultural and religious upbringing, and has centered his work around exploring subjective queerness through these various multiplicities of identity. Alexei portrays his personal journey to find a sense of belonging through interrogations of sexuality and representation by using symbols that represent these struggles as ongoing transformations.