HALLWAY GALLERY: Eye Candy | The Jelly Beans Series by Elena Alexander
May 20 - May 29
Free
Hallway Gallery: Eye Candy | The Jelly Beans Series by Elena Alexander
cSPACE Marda Loop
Level 2 Gallery
May 20 – May 29, 2026
8:00 AM – 8:00 PM (Closed Sundays)
Eye Candy: The Jelly Beans Series is a solo exhibition by Calgary artist Elena Alexander, on view at cSPACE Marda Loop, Level 2, from May 20 to 29, 2026.
This vibrant exhibition features original geometric abstract paintings from Alexander’s ongoing Jelly Beans series. Built around rounded forms, bold colour, repetition, and visual rhythm, the series explores how simple shapes can shift attention, affect mood, and change the feeling of a space.
At first glance, the works are bright, playful, and immediate. They have the visual pleasure suggested by the title Eye Candy. Beneath the colour and rounded forms, however, the series also speaks to focus, structure, and the act of looking closely.
About the Jelly Beans Series
The Jelly Beans series began with a simple visual idea: rounded forms repeated across the canvas, each one carrying its own colour, weight, and mood.
The forms are playful and almost candy-like, which is where the title Eye Candy comes from. The paintings invite viewers to pause and enjoy colour as an experience in itself. Each shape is similar, but not identical. Each colour changes the feeling of the whole composition. A deep red can ground a painting. A pale blue can create openness. A bright green can bring energy. A soft lavender can shift the pace.
As the eye moves from one form to the next, the viewer begins to notice relationships, contrasts, and small moments of balance. In that way, the paintings become a visual rhythm. They are structured, but not rigid. Joyful, but still deliberate.
A Calgary Exhibition About Colour, Focus, and Joy
With Eye Candy: The Jelly Beans Series, Alexander wanted to create a moment of brightness and focus within a shared public space.
Daily life can feel fast, fragmented, and overstimulating. We are often pulled between information, obligations, screens, and noise. This exhibition offers a different kind of visual experience, one that gives the eye somewhere to land.
The exhibition is not about escaping the world. It is about noticing how something as simple as colour and shape can change the way we move through it. What begins as a bright and playful surface becomes a study in repetition, contrast, decision-making, and focus.
Geometric Abstract Paintings at cSPACE Marda Loop
The exhibition includes both larger Jelly Beans paintings and smaller works from the Mini Jelly Beans group. Together, they show how the same visual language can shift across scale.
The larger works create a strong presence in the exhibition space, allowing viewers to experience colour and repetition across a wider field of vision. The smaller works are more intimate, inviting close looking and showing how much variation can happen within a compact format.
Across the series, the rounded forms suggest softness, sweetness, and movement, while the structured arrangement gives the work clarity. This contrast gives the paintings their energy. They are bright, but not chaotic. Ordered, but not cold. Playful, but not random.
About Elena Alexander
Elena Alexander is a Calgary-based abstract artist working in hard-edge geometric painting. Her work explores structure, colour, repetition, and the way visual order can create moments of focus and clarity.
Her paintings are non-representational, but they often suggest movement, rhythm, and emotional tone through colour relationships and repeated forms. Drawing from geometric abstraction, modernism, colour field painting, and hard-edge painting, Alexander creates works that are clean, vibrant, and carefully composed.
View more of her work at elena-alexander.com
