Alexandra Sherman: Ordinary Madness

Megan Mulrooney is pleased to present our first exhibition with Los Angeles based artist Alexandra Sherman. The exhibition will be on view from November 15 – December 20, 2025. 

Ordinary Madness presents to us with heightened attention otherwise unremarkable intervals of daily life -- moments that are neither climactic nor staged, but charged with density of color and feeling. Working from photographs she takes in passing, Sherman paints the small, unguarded gestures of friends and strangers: hands worrying a glass, a swallowed expression, the sun-soaked weight of a late afternoon. These are images taken with no intention beyond noticing, and yet in their translation to paint, they gain a gravity that is both personal and collectively felt. 

Sherman paints from memory as much as from reference. Each work begins with a heavy black underpainting, over which she builds thin, aqueous layers of acrylic, letting forms waver slightly out of register. The surfaces never resolve into photographic clarity; instead, they operate like the way recollection returns to us -- soft around the edges, selectively bright in places, altered by sentiment. Her cropping heightens this effect: the frame closes around a detail, or a face turns just out of view. 

Tonally, the exhibition moves between introspection and performance while a subtle melancholy runs through the scenes. There is a building sense that everyone carries a private madness or sadness they try, with varying degrees of success, to soften through movement, company, substances, or routine. In Ordinary Madness, Sherman captures the retrospective feeling that arrives when we look back at old photographs and understand something that was not legible at the time, whether an emotion forming beneath the surface, or an unspoken thought beginning to take shape. These paintings take shape in that gap between experience and later recognition, where memory becomes less a factual record and more a feeling one returns to.

Alexandra Sherman (b. 1993, Tajikistan-born Canadian; lives and works in Los Angeles) earned her Design & Arts degree from Capilano University, British Columbia, and spent several years as an illustrator before devoting herself fully to painting. She has exhibited with Sade, Los Angeles; Noon Projects, Los Angeles; Dynamo Gallery, Vancouver; Mixed Gems Gallery, Vancouver; Matson Ambrose Gallery, Yucca Valley; and Slice Gallery, Vancouver.