BmoreArt

One visceral material prevails: the mass-produced synthetic yoga mat, in all its endless color variations targeted to individual consumer preference. As my eyes trace the transitions from one grid of anti-slip texture to another—say, where a black ellipse nestles snugly into a tangerine rectangle like a satisfying jigsaw puzzle—I can almost hear/feel a squeak, as if I were scraping a toe across the surface rather than my gaze.

These associations with the body, touch, labor, and conspicuous “wellness” consumption aren’t incidental—even if the path that led Ebstein to this work has been defined by accidents, unforeseen complications, and experimentation born out of frustration. History most definitely will remember Alex Ebstein as an artist who centered the tactile, but she surprisingly began her undergraduate academic career at Goucher College as a photographer. Her eyesight, however, began to deteriorate due to uveitis and resulting glaucoma, a condition that to this day requires regular management to mitigate.

“My vision was going through all these shifts… I had a lot of doubt around my perception of the world and how it was going to be different. So tactility became important,” she recalls of art school. “As my eyes were getting worse, I had a really hard time distinguishing between grays and knowing I could no longer be confident that I was getting a perfect exposure and a perfect print. I moved out of photography really consciously,” she explains. “I knew I was up against my own limitations. I didn’t want to cling too hard to one thing that was getting harder and I didn’t know if I would still be able to do in the future.”

Ebstein began working with collage and a graphic style of drawing, gradually incorporating more fiber-based components into her work. In 2008, Ebstein and Adelsberger opened the gallery Nudashank out of their apartment in the H&H building, a six-story DIY warren of artist studios, live-work, and concert spaces. Nudashank, followed by its two storefront successors in the Bromo Arts District, quickly became somewhat of a kingmaker in the Baltimore art scene—connecting their community with peers on a national level as well as collectors in New York and Europe. Ebstein describes this period as influential to her own development as an artist as well, informed by her experience as a DIY curator.

“I tried getting more into the idea of taking up space in a room and changing my relationship to installation,” she explains. “I was always doing installations for other people… and I don’t ever want to have my own work in my head when I’m in the gallery, but I definitely don’t want to have someone else’s work in my head when I’m in the studio!”

This struggle resulted in a more architectural consideration of materials. Ebstein began slicing into her 2D works, excavating depth beyond the figure plane, and experimenting with aggregates such as perlite for potting soil to build up unexpected impasto surfaces in paintings. Strands of yarn, collaged fragments of acrylic paint, and structures resembling shelving or framing began to protrude from her panels—asserting themselves off the wall and inching closer to those regions of the white cube usually considered the domain of sculptures or viewers.

All the while, Ebstein had to juggle visits to multiple eye specialists for regular glaucoma treatment, resulting in her eyes being dilated with frustrating frequency—the doctors siloed into their unique area and focused on medication and surgical interventions rather than holistic options. She was given conflicting advice that she should both avoid any activities that might irritate the tube shunts that manage pressure in her eyes, and also that vigorous exercise might help reduce inflammation. Perhaps yoga would be a safe compromise? At one point in her search for answers, she came across a book in which the author claimed he could cure glaucoma with yoga. Unfortunately, the opposite proved true in Ebstein’s experience, resulting in higher eye pressures that risked further vision loss.

Ebstein began to grow increasingly cynical of mainstream Western medicine’s bureaucracy and “wellness” culture’s empty promises—and how both commodified aspirations of health and the body. She was already considering these themes while pursuing her MFA at Towson University, when her body was thrown yet another curveball in the form of a car speeding the wrong direction down a one-way street. Ebstein was driving from an opening at Nudashank to another for an exhibition she had curated at the university when her car was struck, setting off her airbags and fracturing her elbow in the process.

With her range of motion severely restricted and eyesight that had undergone a number of shifts over the course of five surgeries—including occasionally occurring blind spots—Ebstein faced the daunting task of a painting thesis with limited access to a painter’s most valued anatomy. She decided to take out her frustrations with the body on an apt surrogate—the ubiquitous, not-so-humble yoga mat. She purchased a pack of the foamy membranes and laid them on the studio floor. From above, she used her functional arm to carve into them with painterly gestures, conceptualizing the resulting forms as an index of a performance, the way AbEx painters might’ve sloshed house paint and cigarette butts across raw canvas or artists of the Gutai might’ve flopped into mud. But her process, its vulnerability, her choice of material, and its associations with the idealized body and consumer culture place this action as much in the annals of feminist art history as ontological concerns.

“I had to work out how to keep my head level and try to imagine the shapes I was making,” she describes. “I would not look at them until after they were cut out and I could lift up the piece and see what happened to the integrity of the yoga mat. Did it become more interesting because it was damaged, weakened? Or like swiss cheese and lacy-like? Could something that was a stand-in for the body that had these flaws become something unrecognizable and more beautiful or more interesting than the solid or familiar object?”

The answer has been a resounding yes. These early yoga mat experiments became a compelling new medium for a collage practice, equal parts aesthetically pleasing and conceptually loaded. Ebstein’s work has continued to evolve, incorporating more installation elements and unexpected materials in notable exhibitions from New York’s Victori + Mo gallery to DC’s Katzen Museum. Ebstein herself has grown, confronting her fears of causing further damage to her vision. She’s now an early riser who loves cardio from spin classes to running. And yes—yoga.

“For so long I was so afraid of straining my body and knocking something out of place, but now I feel the best I ever have,” she concludes with a sheepish grin. “You know, I started getting into wellness culture almost ironically as a research project for my work… I hated the idea of perfection culture or something about the consumption being an admission of your own inadequacy. But now I love it! The endorphin high will change your life.”

More comfortable in her own skin, Ebstein is more prolific than ever. Luckily for Baltimore’s art scene, she bounces back and forth from her arts administration roles to the gym and studio with enviable energy. And I’ll say it—conflicts of interest be damned—what happens in her studio is lucky for art history.