Lexi Bass

Lexi Bass, MFA | EDA Duke University (‘18) is an experimental filmmaker and artist. Her films have screened widely in London, Amsterdam, Cologne, Hanover, Graz, Mykonos, Pafos, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Minneapolis and Louisville, KY. She has collaborated with musicians, dancers, and theatres from Berea College to the University of Nebraska to the Universidad de San Buenaventura in Cali, Colombia.

To be human is to be caught between the biological functioning of our animality and the moral evolution of our capacity for abstract thought. Lexi’s work explores the delicate balance and respect required to walk between these two worlds. This fundamental conflict manifests itself through the juxtaposition of the hand-made against the digital, particularly now as humans evolve and integrate AI within our society. 

As someone with childhood epilepsy, subjective experiences of the mind are fascinating, and dreams and nightmares have also played an important role in Lexi’s artistic practice. Many of her films reenact nightmares for the screen, exploring a psychological process suggested by Carl Jung in which dreams translate knowledge from the unconscious to the conscious mind, creating a tangible document for others to study and a personal mythology which one can use to navigate difficult experiences and unknown frontiers. Whether with film, video, animation, or physical materials, her work is a deep analysis of the damaged personal or societal psyche and its transcendence through the naming of its own changing shape; a gentle documentation of grieving, questioning and healing.