How to describe the indescribable: “unapologetically fluid”
Alecia Vera Buckles can catch your eye in any dark and noisy venue with her shocking blue hair and Cheshire cat smile. I met her while working The Road to Nightfall last year. Fast forward and I’m sitting on a foot rest in the Bazar Odditorium talking with Alecia about her time growing as an artist.
Alecia radiates an aura of serenity in this place, a severe contrast from the busy bartender I’ve always known her to be.
It’s clear this is her element with chill music in the background and the summer sun alighting her with an ethereal glow. She reminds me of a brooding hurricane during a sunset when the sun gives the rising storm a fiery intensity across a turbulent sea.
Alecia’s journey began in Rossville living with her mother until attending Shorter University, a small Baptist college in Rome, Georgia.
There Alecia discovered joy in creating within a welcoming and supportive art department. Although she claims that art never came easy to her, she made it a focused area of study rather than pursue more career driven subjects.
“When anybody asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I always just said ‘Happy’ and when they asked how I would pay the bills I would say, I don’t care as long as I’m happy,” she said. Alecia also studied for a year at UTC where she learned to create art in a more results driven environment.
“I do not thrive in competitive environments at all, so I floundered. I was really pushed to the point where I did not want to pursue art, I made art I wasn’t connected to. A lot of people do really well because it forces them to pull out the inner workings of their minds, but that didn’t work for me personally,” she said.
Alecia returned to Shorter to finish up her degree since it would assure her a debt free education. She returned to a more suitable pace that allowed her free reign of the department earning her a Bachelors of Fine Art degree with a minor in painting.
However, during her time at UTC she experienced the Chattanooga art scene and felt a desire to fully immerse herself into the city’s artistic community.
“I’ve always maintained a connection with Chattanooga even when attending Shorter. I’d come up for work on the weekends. It’s a small cozy city and I’ve always had a super great network with the artists even before I thrived as an artist myself. What they were doing was so cool and I thought, ‘I really want to be a part of that scene’,” she said.
Alecia still takes up various side hustles in town to pay the bills but only to afford herself the flexibility to dedicate meaningful studio time. During the day she is curator of The Bazar Odditorium which exists within The Palace Theater.
For Alecia, being a curator is part of a fully realized dream as a colorful facilitator and vibrant contributor to the evolving art within the city.
To classify, Alecia’s work would be like trying to pin-the-tail on a donkey made of mercury in zero gravity. She has cultivated commercial success with her Gunk head art. Gunk heads are comprised of bright colored paint remnants and the recycled bits she salvages from other projects. She incorporates various textures and substance with two-dimensional figures and faces. Her bright flamboyant personality bleeds through her works which offer a complex array of emotional configurations with eye popping explosions of color.
At present she is experimenting with sculptures made of spray foam which for the most part resemble a David Cronenburg nightmare rampaging through an LSD fueled gypsy circus.
Again, she’s hard to pin down. What these sculptures offer is some kind of otherworldly fun to experience for those with a sense of the daring, the bold, and the whimsical.
“The spray foam is great because it’s super unpredictable so I’m real excited to start doing figures with it. I’m coming back to my work with a level of intensity because I’m using it as a form of therapy to work through a lot of emotional stuff. But I am still adding my love of color with all of it” she said.
Not only can Alecia’s work be found at The Bazar Odditorium but also online at www.aleciavera.com and follow her on Instagram @aleciavera to see what amazing things this aqueous artist has in store with her unapologetic approach to art.