Alix Vernet: Everything She Touches

Alix Vernet (b. Denver, CO, 1997) is an artist who explores, through her “street casts,” the histories and life cycles of public spaces and the built environment. She creates molds from the street and architectural facades of New York City, like the lintels of tenement buildings or letters from the facade of the Brooklyn Public Library, casting them into wall-mounted stoneware sculptures. Her work is often glazed in a metallic, silvery gray with a reflective finish. Everything She Touches, taking place on the gallery’s lower level, will showcase distinct movements from Vernet’s oeuvre, including ceramic casts of manhole covers, lifted urban surfaces, and a new series of foil rubbings.

In 2022, Vernet was working on a series of street casts and became aware that Sari Dienes had been doing rubbings from the same sites almost 80 years prior. This led Vernet on a path of researching the historic artist, finding inspiration in her work, and amplifying resonances between their practices. Her presentation at the gallery is in response to Dienes’s work and archive, including work that Vernet has made over her several years of engagement with the artist and new work made in direct response to works that will be in the gallery’s concurrent show. Beyond the literal motif of manhole covers, which is a found object as well as a symbolic portal, the two artists share experimental processes, the layering of indexical markers, interest in found objects, and the aesthetic philosophy of reflection. For this exhibition, Vernet has produced a new body of work: foil rubbings of gravestones from Trinity Church, the same site where Dienes had worked in 1954. 

Vernet’s sculptures are records of the often invisible public presence moving through spaces. Working outdoors and on the street, her projects frequently involve collaborators including technicians, city workers, and passersby. In this presentation, each movement has a specific relationship to the street. Further, her use of tin foil transforms a humble material, so often sidewalk detritus, into a glittering metal relief. Vernet’s work quietly investigates the present moment by preserving the past, to express how desire and value are embedded in architecture and public spaces. For this exhibition, she has focused on New York, the city that she and Dienes share across time. 

Vernet received her MFA from Yale University in 2025, and her BA from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2019. She is an emerging artist with growing recognition in the art world and media. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at Market Gallery, Helena Anrather, Chapter, and Francois Ghebaly. It has been reviewed in Frieze, Artforum, and Art in America.