Alex Da Corte: Free Roses

Provocative, puzzling, and visually intoxicating, Alex Da Corte’s vibrant works merge the languages of modern design and abstraction with banal objects from our everyday lives, mining the ubiquitous products of consumer culture for their unexpected formalism as well as their emotional and libidinal associations.

The purple hue of a specific Alberto V05 shampoo, the bright yellow of a rubber kitchen glove, the sinuous arc of a pink plastic water pitcher: Da Corte engages these objects both for their visual appeal and as symbols of aspiration and longing. His work also draws attention to their role as markers of taste, class, and race.

An heir to the Pop artists, as well as more recent forefathers such as Mike Kelley and Robert Gober, Da Corte infuses his mash-ups of popular culture artifacts —and his own sculptural facsimiles—with intimate personal narratives.

He is a storyteller—equally influenced by Disney, Hitchcock, the theater, opera, and the Sistine Chapel. His works are rife with art historical references from Kandinsky to Duchamp to Ellsworth Kelly, and often incorporate the original work of other contemporary artists into his own.

Combining these artworks with dime-store tchotchkes and his own sculptural reproductions, Da Corte questions the nature of authorship and standard hierarchies of aesthetic and economic value, as well as the separation between the real and representation.

A survey of Da Corte’s work made over the last decade, Free Roses remixes works from seven major series and partially restages past exhibitions. Da Corte presents the work—which includes paintings, sculpture, video, and photography—in a sumptuous environment of carpeted, colored, and tiled floors, vividly painted walls, and multi-hued neon lighting which bathes the installations in a strange, moody glow.

Referencing various familiar interiors—a New York diner, a strip club, a suburban mall, the comfort of a teenager’s bedroom—this simultaneously seductive and disorienting backdrop transports viewers out of the museum and into a space of fantasy. Just as opera relies on music to help tell stories, communicating emotion to audiences who might not understand Italian or German, Da Corte speaks with a common language of vernacular objects, channeling emotion through color, pattern, and form.

A Season in He’ll, Bad Blood, and The Impossible, 2012, digital video with sound, 5:04 minutes / 3:59 minutes / 11:00 minutes, courtesy of the artist

Lightning

A sprawling ensemble of new work unfolds over eight colorful zones in the large gallery like a sequence of film stills. Seven carpets and a swan pond function as pedestals for sculptural tableaux which imagine the façade, interior, and yard of a suburban house. Da Corte has noted that the multipart installation format was partially inspired

by Disney’s multiplane animation camera. First used in 1937 for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the multi-plane camera shoots through seven individually painted panes of glass to give the image the look of three dimensions. Similarly, Da Corte’s eight scenes present simultaneous views of a house undone both metaphorically and physically, its insides exposed and split like those of a tree struck by lightning. Titled Lightning the installation references Joseph Beuys’ sculpture

Lightning with Stag in its Glare—a fixture at MASS MoCA for over a decade and visible in the far gallery—as well as a chapter of Arthur Rimbaud’s epic poem A Season in Hell. This is the artist’s sixth work based on the young 19thcentury poet’s angst-ridden, drug-fueled prose which wrestles with his art, his sexuality, and his conflicts with his family and religion, as well as the staggering loss of love—all struggles which mirror Da Corte’s own.

The elements of Lightning are an amalgam of Da Corte’s memories and scenes from a number of classic movies including Singing in the Rain, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, Clue, Beetlejuice, and Toys. The first tableau imagines a “SWATTED” house—the violent result of a fake emergency call—with the sofa knocked over, cushions

Lightning, 2015–16 (detail), laminate, carpet, neon, plexiglass, MDF, plywood, clay, house paint, wool, K’nex, artificial fruits and vegetables, thread, ceramic cookie jars, plastic bank, mannequin hands, personal Orbit Cobra water spritzer, foam cheese helmet, paint roller, billiard table, plastic trumpets, velvet, artificial Christmas tree, Christmas tree stand, steel, plastic tubing, Magic 8 ball, ivory tusk, casters, artificial cake, artificial deviled eggs, plastic corner guards, wire, soda can tops, metal pipe, hinges, wood stain, Coca-Cola mini fridge, artificial ice, Minnie Mouse figurine, motorized crab wind-up toy, motor, fiberglass, aluminum, plastic swan flower pots, water, epoxy, wax, battery operated candles, PVC pipe, silver, tennis balls, wicker hat, rubber, tape, coyote fur, dog leash, plastic handle, broom pole, rubber mask, glue, rubber tongue, foam, taxidermy nails, arc lamp, automotive paint, pillows, nylon bags, fabric-wrapped cord, flood light, Alberto VO5 shampoo, cocktail stirrers, polystyrene, paper laminate, vinyl, Adam Wallacavage’s Spider Lamp, Bondo, Model Magic, washers, Lip Couch, artificial cherry tomatoes, plastic beaded curtain, plastic cauldron, digitally printed laminate, coffee grounds, artificial flowers, chrome-plated shovel head, flocking, sign paint, Overall dimensions site-specific, courtesy of the artist and Luxembourg & Dayan Gallery

strewn over the carpet, and food flying through the air. The colorful walls and sofa are a fusion of the Simpsons cartoon living room and interiors from Singing in the Rain. Da Corte had in mind the good-natured scene in which Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds dance on the furniture but also the violent house attack in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (during which the degenerate droog, Alex, sings lyrics from the musical.) Among the many evocative objects in the installation are a billiard table-cum-mouse trap, an Italian arc lamp with its head stuck in a stockade-like garden gate, a masked Akita (the kind of dog that witnessed Nicole Brown Simpson’s murder), and a sculptural rendition of the iconic ending shot from the Looney Tunes cartoons—but with “That’s all Folks” missing.

Images of family, security, and violence co-mingle, as do references to sex and death, and signifiers of class difference—high and low jumbled together. Like influential filmmakers and artists before him, from David Lynch and Toddy Haynes to Paul McCarthy and Kelley, Da Corte strips away the façade of comfort and convention, exposing what is usually repressed.

by Sascha Braunig, Nancy Lupo, and others—all sealed behind plexiglass sheets.

Transforming three-dimensional objects into two dimensions, the works mimic the flattening and leveling effects of the internet, which treats content without hierarchy. From a distance, the arrangement of Kraft Cheese Singles, animal print hat, shampoo bottle, and a squid lure in The Brother Bleeds and Runs might be mistaken for a Kandinsky painting.

But in Da Corte’s installation, the works are treated less like artwork and more like a collection of CDs. Both the works themselves and the way they are presented illustrate Da Corte’s interest in how we all “curate” objects. He is particularly attracted to objects which, in his words, “he doesn’t understand or doesn’t like.” He often tries to liberate his work from his own taste in order to study how others find pleasure in the form, color, or composition of even the most mundane elements and to unpack what those objects tell us about their users.

Dedication Monuments Plastics Paintings CD Paintings

In a gallery with lavender carpet covering the floor and curving up the walls, Da Corte casually leans and stacks a number of his large square “Plastics Paintings.” The installation partially recreates Fun Sponge, an exhibition presented in 2013 at the ICA in Portland, Maine. The works are carefully arranged compositions of items typically found at big-box home centers or local dollar stores—CD cases (featuring some of Da Corte’s favorite bands), shower curtain rings, and magazine images, as well as art works Cold War, 2011, metal chair, foam, spray paint, peanut butter, aluminum foil, rubber egg, rear view mirror, 25 x 17 x 32 inches, collection of Joshua Rechnitz

Here the “Plastics Paintings” are shown along with a large selection of his related “CD Paintings,” each of which is an image of an album cover from Da Corte’s music collection. These works metaphorically zoom closer to the objects of the earlier series—one of many instances of compression and expansion seen throughout Da Corte’s practice. The cover images are printed on fabric and altered by the artist; text and image are partially covered. Da Corte sees his gestures as masks which disguise the original, making it his own. Hinting at music’s ability to be both personal and communal, the works tap into the emotion and nostalgia shared by artist and viewer. With the size and physicality of the images, Da Corte draws attention to the loss of the object—the touch once associated with music via the CD jewel cases that have been traded for downloads. Teenage paychecks are no longer spent on the soundtracks to their lives and loves.

Just as one might dedicate a song on the radio to a particular loved one, Da Corte dedicates most of his sculptures to family and friends. The selections of sculpture on view are all portraits of a kind, constellations of objects that form an image of a person and his or her story, much like the symbols and attributes found in Lives of the Saints, a classic compendium of Catholic figures by the 18th-century priest Alban Butler.

Cold War (2011), which features a rubber egg and a jar of peanut butter sitting precariously on a folding chair in mid-collapse, is a portrait of the artist’s mother. Bringing to mind Joseph Beuys’ iconic Fat Chair (1964), which used fat to imply internal processes and feelings and to equate art with nourishment, Da Corte uses peanut butter as a stand in for his mother’s love and care. Like Beuys’ fat, in a mother’s pantry peanut butter is perhaps the most basic element that can be converted into energy, yet there is a certain maternal guilt in defaulting to the easiest option—a cold sandwich rather than a hot meal.

Nevertheless, it is a symbol of primary needs met.

Installation view of Alex Da Corte: Fun Sponge at ICA Portland, Maine

As Is Wet Hoagie Chelsea Hotel No. 2

Food plays an important role in Da Corte’s work —a symbol of life forces and appetites of all kinds.

In As Is Wet Hoagie, alternating red and white diagonal stripes provide a vibrating backdrop for a giant, cast-rubber sub sandwich. The oversized hoagie sits on a striped table which balances on four Coke mini cans. Da Corte and collaborator Borna Sammak first showed the sculpture in an installation at New York’s Oko gallery which they transformed into a deli. The enormous, phalluslike hero was at the back of the space, visible through layers of windows, but inaccessible— a nod to Duchamp’s enigmatic Étant Donnés (1946–66, Philadelphia Museum of Art). Da Corte connects the unusual promise of the ubiquitous corner store—its ability to satisfy any craving at any time of night—to the promise of the hoagie.

Forever preserved in a moment of perpetual anticipation and perfection, however, the rubber hoagie is the opposite of the cut-rate, soggy sandwich of the work’s title. Immune to the inevitable decay of time, it is, like most fantasies, also unreal.

As Is Wet Hoagie is presented here with the artist’s seminal video Chelsea Hotel No. 2 (2010), named for the Leonard Cohen song which provides the soundtrack. Two hands—covered in flour, coffee, aluminum foil, and packing tape—manipulate foodstuffs and inanimate objects, sticking raspberries onto fingertips, squashing a stack of bread slices, cutting a piece of bologna with scissors, shaking a bottle of Coke, squeezing an inflated grocery bag.

The video bursts with color, featuring a bright orange bucket, a robin’s egg blue plastic bowl, and cherry-red soda. Ketchup, soda, shampoo, and nail polish mimic both paint and bodily secretions. The work is both a study and a performance of color, texture, movement, sound, smell, and desire. All images are sexy in Da Corte’s work; he understands that “fantasy is present and available in all forms.”

Alex Da Corte and Borna Sammak, As is Wet Hoagie, 2013, table, cast rubber hoagie, Coke cans, and painted wall, collection of Dennis Freedman

A Season in He’ll Bad Blood The Impossible Foolish Virgin Quilts

In three videos influenced by Rimbaud’s hallucinatory fits of genius—Season in He’ll, Bad Blood, and The Impossible, a young man enacts strange, hedonistic activities that reference the drugs and violent suffering that the poet believed was necessary to his creativity. Against sumptuous, jewel-colored backgrounds, the neatly dressed, clean-cut protagonist variously snorts an egg, smokes from a houka made from a fruit bowl, punches himself in the face with brass knuckles, and shoots soda into his arm Together, the trio of works—all in painfully slow motion— imply the drug-like allure of consumable objects, but more importantly pictures the artists’ real and metaphorical efforts to reach higher states, to see differently. For both Rimbaud and Da Corte, the tug-of-war between art and convention means embracing a rather frightening lack of control as well as exposing one’s inner demons and desires.

Several of Da Corte’s “Foolish Virgin Quilts”— named for Rimbaud—hang on the walls.

The works are digital facsimiles of his mother’s collection of Hermès scarves, yearly anniversary gifts from Da Corte’s father. The originals are kept in boxes under the bed, unworn, waiting for the right occasion or perhaps the right wearer for the luxury accessory. Da Corte’s knock-offs are adorned with more fakery; he sews items such as plastic food and flowers, a devil’s cape, a prosthetic witch’s finger, and a rubber snake to the fabric. These Halloween props equate the scarf with cheap costume and disguise instead of their usual wealth and status.

Easternsports

Da Corte’s wonderfully strange video installation Easternsports (2014), made in collaboration with artist Jayson Musson, is a dazzling, four-channel video installed on four monumental, freestanding walls surrounded by a quilt-inspired pinwheel pattern of green and beige tile. The work envelops viewers in the vibrant, surreal, visually ordered, but psychologically messy world familiar to Da Corte’s work. The 3-hour kaleidoscopic video-cum-telenovela, with a poetic script by Musson and music by Dev Hynes, is inspired by the Thornton Wilder play Our Town.

That minimal classic is re-imagined with brightly colored and patterned sets, shiny props, enigmatic characters, and references to the likes of Don Quixote, Peter Greenaway, Sol LeWitt, Edna Andrade, and Ja Rule. In Easternsports, the products and objects of Da Corte’s sculptures become the props through which the video’s archetypal protagonists—often dressed in pareddown costumes of body-hugging tights—“perform,” in the artist’s words, “their desired lifestyles.”

Da Corte emphasizes the theatricality, and even the wonderful absurdity, of daily rituals and how they construct and reflect our dreams

Red Anthuriums Blush, 2014, digitally printed Hermès scarf on nylon, satin ribbon, velvet ribbon, satin gloves, silk red anthuriums, buttons, devil cape, rubber devil horns, mirrored plexiglass, plexiglass, spray paint, thread, Calvin Klein’s Obsession, 60 × 55 inches, private collection

and ideologies: a young woman shops for shiny, brilliantly hued objects with the help of an attendant on stilts as a skateboarder rolls by; three bare-chested young Adonises play beer pong, and a mummy (Da Corte in costume) sings karaoke against a Matisse mural. The title of the work is taken from one of Musson’s poems and alludes to the privileged position of Westerners who try on religions and cultural exports from around the world as they try to find themselves, reducing these philosophies to entertainment, if not commodities.

Table Sculptures

In the exhibition’s last gallery, Da Corte presents a suite of four table sculptures—a series of works that originated with a prop for his “Season in Hell” videos. Meticulous arrangements of items such as frames, hair conditioner, a Wiffle bat, hair rollers, and a laptop case sit atop IKEA shelves and sawhorses. Da Corte is interested in the strategies and conventions of display central to contemporary consumer culture—from the items lovingly placed on a bedroom dresser to the pyramid stack of AXE body wash in the local market. Like predecessors such as Haim Steinbach and peers including Josephine Meckseper, Da Corte investigates the choreographing of goods and our psychic relationships to them. He both

Alex Da Corte and Jayson Musson, Easternsports (video still), 2014, four-channel video with sound, courtesy of the artists Easternsports was organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. ICA is grateful to the Edna W. Andrade Fund of the Philadelphia Foundation for its generous support. Additional funding has been provided by the Daniel S. and Brett Sundheim Endowed Fund.

The tour of Easternsports is supported by Jeffrey R. and Linda Chodorow.

embraces and examines the masks and props we use to create meaning in our lives, to reinvent ourselves, and also to deceive ourselves.

Like many of Da Corte’s works, these arrangements are often portraits of people important to him (Brown & Mercer, named for the street corner where the artist grew up, is a portrait of his parents). Grouped together, the four tables conjure the image of a family gathering.

A bat circling overhead animates the scene, triggering shared memories of the screaminducing creature flying through the house.

Introducing an element of chaos to the ordered scene below, the bat hints at the life missing from the inanimate objects on the tables, while introducing the safe, Halloween-type specter of death. Titled Dead Alive, the bat is trapped, circling the gallery endlessly. In the far corner, however, a ladder leading to a hatch in the ceiling hints at an exit.

Free Roses

Unlike the many contemporary artworks that engage consumer objects with an ironic wink or simple critique, Da Corte’s work stands out for its generosity and romanticism—qualities invoked in the title of the exhibition. Free Roses is inspired by a regular fixture on the streets of Da Corte’s hometown of Philadelphia—a vendor who sells roses to passing cars. Da Corte has long imagined buying her stock of flowers and handing them out for free. This impulse is connected to Da Corte’s interest in the sharing of content and his own appropriation and reuse of found objects, images, and artwork alike. His work, The Deep Pink Sea (2015), for example, is an enlarged and partially painted-over image of a New Order album cover from 1983, which in turn is an appropriated image of painter HenriFantin Latour’s 1890 canvas, A Basket of Roses.

As curator Daniel Birnbaum recently wrote of Da Corte, his conceptual approach to his art is best described as “remake, reuse, reassemble, recombine.” For the artist, his manipulations of the familiar are meant to produce a sense of “jamais vu” (translated as “never seen”)—the uncanny feeling that something that has been seen many times before is strange and new.

ABOVE: The Deep Pink Sea, 2015, paper, velvet, foam, spray paint, sequin pins, tape, plexiglass, anodized metal frames,

56 × 56 in, collection of Adam Cohen FACING PAGE: Brown and Mercer, 2013, sawhorses, enamel paint, plastic-wrapped IKEA shelves, picture frames, gold foil, vinyl,

fiberglass foot display, shampoo, miniature rubber dresses, necklace, mirror display risers, foam, glue stick, Jelly Belly Tutti Frutti air freshener, sticker, rubber snake, laptop holder, zip tie, plastic strawberry, LED plastic finger, Freddy Krueger glove, screw, epoxy, 60 × 40 × 40 inches, courtesy of the artist

Alex Da Corte was born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1980. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Printmaking/Fine Arts from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, and a Master of Fine Arts from the Yale University School of Art, New Haven.

Recent solo exhibitions include Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2015); Gió Marconi, Milan (2015); a site-specific commission for Luxembourg & Dayan Gallery, New York (2015); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2014, with Jayson Musson); Carl Kostyál, Stockholm (2014); White Cube, London (2014); David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen (2014); Joe Sheftel Gallery, New York (2012 and 2013); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Maine College of Art, Portland (2013); Oko, New York (2013, with Borna Sammak); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2012). Da Corte’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions in venues that include the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; La Biennale de Lyon, France; Museum of Modern Art, New York; MoMA PS1, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal; and the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis. In 2012, Da Corte was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.

He lives and works in Philadelphia.

Alex Da Corte: Free Roses On view March 26, 2016 through January 2017. ​This exhibition is supported by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Barr Foundation, Luxembourg & Dayan Gallery, and ArtNet. Exhibitions of emerging artists are made possible in part by the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation.​ Cover: Chelsea Hotel No. 2 (video still), 2010, digital video with sound, courtesy of the artist.

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