Director
ROY G BIV re-creates [sic] a gallery in the Philadelphia Museum of Art–the Artist’s hometown museum–that houses sculptures by Constantin Brancusi. Da Corte plays four characters in the video: the artist Marcel Duchamp; Duchamp’s female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy; Duchamp dressed as the Joker in Tim Burton’s 1989 film Batman; and one of two figures in Brancusi’s sculpture The Kiss (1916), who comes to life via stop motion animation. The accumulation of color and eventual emancipation of The Kiss is central to this story of love, loss, and transformation. [Overview courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art]
Director
Slow Graffiti was produced for Da Corte’s exhibition at the Vienna Secession in 2017. The video is a shot-for-shot remake of the film “The Perfect Human” by Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth (1967). The original is narrated in an anthropological manner, or as if listening to a guide at a zoo, but Da Corte’s version is stranger and more philosophical. Leth’s film has uncomfortable implications, such as: is the perfect human white, attractive, detached? The original, which is shot with a sense of fashion (resembling contemporary clothing commercials), offers mixed signals about objectivity, and at the very least a provocation about the notion of human perfection.
Director
"Will the real Slim Shady please stand up?" sang the rapper known to his estranged mother as Marshall Bruce Mathers III, but better known to the rest of us as Eminem. That the Philadelphia-based artist Alex Da Corte was attracted to the early-noughties icon is perhaps unsurprising, given Da Corte’s long-held interest in artifice and pop culture, masking and makeup. After a friend noted a passing resemblance, Da Corte started to ‘embody’ the persona of the musician, not least bleaching his hair, in the hope that by taking on these outward signifiers, he might better understand a figure whose politics Da Corte profoundly disagreed with.
Eminem/Slim Shady
"Will the real Slim Shady please stand up?" sang the rapper known to his estranged mother as Marshall Bruce Mathers III, but better known to the rest of us as Eminem. That the Philadelphia-based artist Alex Da Corte was attracted to the early-noughties icon is perhaps unsurprising, given Da Corte’s long-held interest in artifice and pop culture, masking and makeup. After a friend noted a passing resemblance, Da Corte started to ‘embody’ the persona of the musician, not least bleaching his hair, in the hope that by taking on these outward signifiers, he might better understand a figure whose politics Da Corte profoundly disagreed with.
