Alex Da Corte at Art + Practice
KCRW's Art Talk reviews the latest exhibition at the Hammer's partner organization, Art + Practice
According to Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, "Da Corte's show may allude to a love forbidden by society in the late 19th century but this show reminds us that love's frustrations and excesses are timeless."
"Nothing in the normally white gallery of Art + Practice is as it usually is. Institutional neutrality has been overrun by the obsessively detailed decorations of Alex Da Corte, from the bright green and red walls to the linoleum tile on the floor to the entry desk. He has even added a rose-centered stained glass window, an image appropriated from Disney's Beauty and the Beast.
His show, A Season in He'll, on view through September 17, is a concoction of symbolic narratives with wall-scale videos from which the props are presented as sculpture. The show is based on Arthur Rimbaud's 1873 prose poem A Season in Hell, which was driven in part by the end of a tortured love affair with Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine.
Da Corte uses that history to explore motifs of demonization and desire from popular culture. A giant black witch's hat stands before a wall mounted neon sign of stars and the word "Night." Three highly theatrical videos of extreme color show an actor playing the artist and moving in slow motion he goes through the motions of using drink and drugs but with food rather than intoxicating substances. For example, he breaks an egg on the table and snorts the liquid. Props from this video, the candle, a bottle of oil, the syringe, are laid out on a table as artifacts. Music and the smells of sage or clove add to the sensory overload."— Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, August 25, 2016
Read the full article or listen online at the KCRW website.