When the World Ends, What Stories Do We Tell?
- artandcakela
- Jun 24
- 3 min read
By Kristine Schomaker Alexandra Wiesenfeld paints like she's mapping uncharted territory—because she is. In her Los Angeles studio, surrounded by canvases that pulse with otherworldly landscapes and creature-beings, she's charting what comes after. After collapse. After the structures we've built crumble. After nature reclaims what was always hers.
"I tell myself a story," Wiesenfeld explains. "In the far future a few surviving nomads navigate a world that is unmoored, dangerous, and awe-inspiring as nature takes back what is hers." It's not dystopian fantasy—it's emotional archaeology, digging into how we feel the things we see, how we might be in a world remade.
Her paintings don't look like anything you'd expect from climate grief. They're vibrantly alive, layered with colors that seem to breathe—turquoise waterways cutting through coral and purple rock formations, golden orbs floating in spaces that feel both underwater and interplanetary. These aren't disaster paintings. They're possibility paintings.
The German-born, LA-based artist has been exhibiting internationally for over a decade, but her recent work feels urgent in a way that matches our moment. As she prepares for "Disrupting Tomorrow," an immersive group exhibition opening July 19th at Neo Gallery, Wiesenfeld is pushing deeper into questions that feel increasingly pressing: How do we live with climate grief? How do we imagine futures beyond the anthropocentric stories we've been telling?
The Process of Not Knowing
Wiesenfeld's approach mirrors the searching she depicts. She's abandoned the visual source materials she once relied on, instead riding "the space between chaos and commitment to an image until I land on something that teaches me something I didn't know or expect." It's a practice of trust that echoes her painted nomads' search for meaning in an unmade world.
"The hardest part is to trust, when in the weeds, that the image always will end up where it needs to be," she says, "even if weeks can turn into years."
This embrace of not-knowing shows up in the work itself. Her paintings layer and destroy, build and dissolve, creating what she calls "portraits of inner states" that describe "energies of attraction and repulsion as systems form and disintegrate." They're paintings that feel like they're still becoming, even as you look at them.
Teaching Through Making
When Wiesenfeld isn't in her studio, she's teaching painting and drawing at Los Angeles City College—a practice that feeds back into her work. There's something about the act of transmission, of helping others find their visual language, that keeps her own practice grounded in something larger than herself.
Her advice to emerging artists reflects this generosity: "Try to stay in your creative bubble for a while, don't overshare... Know yourself and don't let others define you." But also: "Make friends and trust that they have your best interest in mind as do you theirs."
It's advice that acknowledges the tension between the solitary work of making and the community that sustains it—a tension that shows up in her painted worlds, where lone figures navigate landscapes that feel both isolated and interconnected.
What Comes Next
"Disrupting Tomorrow" will bring Wiesenfeld's work into dialogue with sculptors Regina Herod and Snežana Saraswati Petrović in an exhibition that promises to be more than a viewing experience. Sound pods will merge city sounds with heartbeats and solar vibrations. A video projection will serve as "a metaphoric portal to the multiverse." The space itself becomes part of the story about futures we might inhabit.
It's fitting for an artist whose work has always been about more than what's on the canvas. Wiesenfeld paints to "carve out a more holistic way of looking at nature by expanding my conception of possible ways of being." In a moment when the old ways of being feel increasingly impossible, that expansion feels necessary.
Her nomads are still searching, still navigating their transformed world. But they're not lost—they're finding new ways to communicate with what remains, new stories to tell about what it means to be human in a world that's no longer organized around human needs.
Maybe that's what we need right now: not answers, but new stories. Not solutions, but expanded possibilities. Not certainty, but the courage to keep painting into the unknown.
"Disrupting Tomorrow" opens July 19, 2025 at Neo Gallery. Alexandra Wiesenfeld's work can be seen at alexandrawiesenfeld.com and @alexandrawiesenfeld on Instagram.
