Working with a palette of graphite and gold leaf, Alessandra Maria masterfully weaves together elements of the earthly and ethereal. She is part sorceress, part alchemist, summoning present from past and transmuting myth into truth. Her subtle re-contextualization of iconographic imagery shifts the traditional narrative. Maria’s female subjects are subtle, otherworldly and quiet, but their voices speak loudly. They are not objects. No longer only a Madonna nursing the Christ child, they exist to sustain themselves. Maria’s heroines are luminously presented to be the locus of a mystic power and their own fount of eternal strength.