Alex Da Corte

Art + Practice and The Hammer Museum are pleased to present a solo exhibition by Philadelphia-based interdisciplinary artist Alex Da Corte (b. 1980, Camden, NJ). Organized by Hammer Museum assistant curator Jamillah James, the exhibition marks Da Corte’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.

Da Corte is known for his Pop-informed sensibility and embrace of theatricality. In his elaborate set pieces, banal objects and consumer goods serve as both actors and props in a dreamy, yet simultaneously nightmarish, landscape. Da Corte’s videos, sculptures, paintings, and installations ruminate on personal and cultural politics, alienation, and the complexities of the human experience. An active scavenger of high and low culture, his recent material explorations have involved creating immersive, fantastical environments that showcase the artist’s maximal, surrealist impulses. For Art + Practice, Da Corte is producing an ambitious three-part, site specific installation and several new works, in addition to showing four recent videos, which have never been presented together in the United States.

A Season in He’ll continues the artist’s meditation on Arthur Rimbaud’s “A Season in Hell” (1873), a long form poem that depicts the author’s imagined descent into purgatory and his wrestling with alienation and emotional turmoil. Rimbaud wrote the text shortly after his tumultuous affair with fellow Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine ended. Replete with dense imagery and linguistic flourishes, yet scathing in its allegorical depiction of romance in decline, the text can be taken as a metaphor for embattled queer identity and the path to self actualization.

The exhibition includes a number of new works by Da Corte, inspired by a variety of sources, such as the Walt Disney films Fantasia (1940) and Beauty and the Beast (1991) and the films of Italian horror director Dario Argento in which fantasy, magic, and the supernatural play significant roles in existential battles of good versus evil. The evil in these films is often represented by witches, who employ tricks and spells to best the story’s hero. Yet, these characters generally have a foil that is their mirror opposite, or double, in the service of good. The historical, literary, and cinematic depictions of witches fascinate Da Corte. He suggests that they are an inherently “queer” archetype representing human duality, alienation, misunderstanding, and societal pressures about impulse and decorum.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Da Corte’s 2012 trilogy of videos, named after chapters of Rimbaud’s poem. A Season in He’ll, Bad Blood, and The Impossible each feature an actor, who bears a striking resemblance to the artist himself, performing a series of ritualistic, mysterious, occasionally violent gestures with a tableau of props. Set against a bright monochromatic background, and distinctive soundtracks performed by LE1F with Big Freedia and Boys Noize and Nate Donmoyer. The videos become the space for Da Corte to trouble the performance of masculinity by testing the actor’s physical limitations in adhering to increasingly dangerous and challenging direction. This dynamic culminates in the 2014 A Season in Hell, Part II, a hypnotic, slow motion video for which Da Corte hired a Hollywood stunt double to perform dressed as a mummy, falling from an unknown height while on fire.

A Season in He’ll, in all its playfulness, also manifests a particular sense of unease. The reality that Da Corte constructs within his installations allows for a multiplicity of responses and interpretations. The artist eschews neat binaries in favor of other possibilities—an archival family photograph from a joyous occasion takes on a sinister feel out of context, the pattern of the exhibition’s flooring forms a dizzying optical illusion that tests the surety of what lies underfoot, the speed of the videos on view defy an ordinary sense of time. The exhibition is a symbolic rebus that places seemingly disparate objects in relation to each other; scale, texture, sensation, and humor heighten the experience. Fusing together influences and images, Da Corte uses the space of his work to perform a form of visual alchemy that encapsulates his propensity for the absurd and uncanny.

Alex Da Corte: A Season in He’ll is the last exhibition organized under Art + Practice and the Hammer’s formal two-year partnership, generously supported by the James Irvine Foundation. Art + Practice, after two successful years of collaboration with the Hammer Museum, will begin organizing its exhibitions program independently in Fall 2016 at a new exhibition space located at 3401 W. 43rd Place, Los Angeles, CA 90008.

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. Da Corte’s first museum survey, Free Roses opened in April 2016 at MASS MoCA, North Adams, and continues through early 2017. Recent solo exhibitions include Giò Marconi, Milan (2015); a site-specific commission for Luxembourg & Dayan Gallery, New York (2015); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2014, together with Jayson Musson); White Cube, London (2014); David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen (2014); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Maine College of Art, Portland (2013); Artspeak, Vancouver (2013); Oko, New York (2013, together 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 Museum of Modern Art, New York; MoMA PS1, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Musée des beaux-arts 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.