ALEX MACEDA
Sun Salutations
Opening: July 15th, 6-8 PM
July 15th - August 13th, 2026
Devotion, like color, doesn’t live in a vacuum. It arrives as a result of focus and dedication. Repetition breeds devotion. Alex Maceda thinks of her petite geometric paintings as objects for a domestic shrine or altar, images to be meditated upon. “Sun Salutations” - her first exhibition with Half Gallery - is a hymnal to summer. The series is influenced by Hilma af Klint, Agnes Pelton, her Filipina heritage and Maceda’s time spent living in Joshua Tree. “When I think about summer, I am struck by one particular paradox – colors left out in the sun often become desaturated: sundrenched and sunwashed,” explains the artist. “The faded colors of the northeastern coastal towns. Washed khaki. Soft pinks. However, summer skin behaves in the opposite way. It resaturates: sunkissed. Shades of browns and deep tans. Red sunburns. Certain colors fade out while others intensify.”
Taking an animist approach to color, Maceda amplifies her associations by imagining each shade has its own personality, its own lived experience - an essence or consciousness that guides how a particular color behaves in the world. Through that lens, shapes shift and bend toward categorization: a triangle becomes the tip of a mountain, a slope recalls a bare leg, a straight line echoes the sea’s horizon. “There is a stillness to summer, just like winter. A pause after the inbreath of spring,” says Maceda. “A warmth yet a deadness. Maybe summer is an exhale. I hope this show feels like an exhale: paintings with a sensation of pause and release, yet expansion.”
A “sun salutation” is a sequence of yoga poses that typically marks the beginning of a practice – historically done at sunrise, in modern day, commenced at the start of a class. The body moves from standing to folded over to laying down to piked up in a downward dog position. The movements are synchronized with the breath to physically awaken the body and build internal heat. The sequence is dynamic and intentional, each pose, however simple, requires every part of the body to be held at a specific angle to find balance, power, and what Alex describes as an internal charge.
She looks for this same dynamic harmony in her paintings. Each painting contains its own internal logic that is seeking this jolt: a balance between form and color, all bathed in a certain kind of light, all set between literal and metaphoric reads. Between the symbolic and the empirical is where we find a mythic reality. It needn’t be explicit in every artwork, but its presence felt.
For example, a cazimi, astrologically, is when a planet aligns with the sun, similar to an eclipse, but not involving the earth’s moon. This alignment is thought to super-power the planet involved and what it controls; certain cazimis, if related to a benefic planet, are thought to be very lucky. While Maceda didn’t set out to depict this, she found this - the idea of superpowering a good force - to be in the spirit of these small icon paintings.