Alexia Mentzel is an artist and art educator from Dallas, Texas. Her work is about the aura of place. The artist seeks out environments that hold personal meaning to her or that captivate her in some way, particularly urbanscapes. She visually deconstructs the scenes she experiences and reconstructs them into her large-scale mixed media paintings. Mentzel views places as settings to stories, and she notes that often the characters of these stories leave traces of who they are within the settings they experience. Sometimes these traces are physically tangible, and sometimes the impact a person or community has on an environment simply resonates through the air. The artist strives to capture the essence of a place by painting not only what is physically seen, but what the psyche can sense. Her endeavor is to develop a sincere and, at times, vulnerable interpretation of what she observes, senses, and remembers. Mentzel received her Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from the University of Texas in Arlington in 2015, and she is currently seeking her Masters of Fine Arts at Texas A>M University in Commerce. She has exhibited in numerous shows at Texas A>M University's Fine Arts Gallery in Commerce (2017-2018) and Wathena Gallery (2018). Her first solo show was held at Paris Junior College (Feb-March 2019). In 2018, Mentzel was honored to receive the Conception Global Art Collective’s Award for Excellence, and in Spring of 2019 she was acknowledged as Teacher of the Year by the Ellis County Art Association.