Artspeak
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Alex Da Corte was born in Camden, New Jersey in 1980. He graduated from the Yale University School of Art in 2010 and currently lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Da Corte has recently shown work at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and at MoMA PS1, New York, as well as in galleries throughout the United States and Europe. Da Corte was named a 2012 Pew Fellow in the Arts and had a solo exhibition at Joe Sheftel Gallery, New York in January 2012.
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Dr. Daniel Keyes teaches English Literature and Cultural Studies with an emphasis on media studies at UBC Okanagan in Kelowna, British Columbia. His research reflects an interest in media and performance and is informed by his dissertation on the performance of testimonials on daytime talk shows in the mid-1990s. More recently his research focuses on the problematic expressions of cultural nationalism in 1950 and 1960s theatre productions throughout BC; television studies with a focus on reality TV; and contemporary articulations of whiteness in the Okanagan.
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A curator and writer based in San Francisco, where she is Curator and Head of Programs at the CCA Wattis Institute. Nguyen was formerly Director/Curator of Artspeak from 2011-2016. Her writing has appeared in exhibition catalogues and periodicals nationally and internationally, with recent texts in catalogues published by Pied-à-Terre (San Francisco), Gluck 50/Mousse (Milan), and the Herning Museum of Art (Denmark). Nguyen is the recipient of the 2015 Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Emerging Curators in Contemporary Canadian Art and the 2016 Joan Lowndes Award from the Canada Council for the Arts for excellence in critical and curatorial writing.
Exhibitions
Bacon Brest
ALEX DA CORTE
May 4–June 15, 2013
In Bacon Brest, Alex Da Corte (Philadelphia) reconsiders the system of Hollywood through a revised version of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”—a parlor game which proposes that anyone on earth is a mere six connections from the actor. Da Corte repositions players such as Martin Brest, Wes Craven, and Halle Berry’s Catwoman as central bloodlines of Hollywood, weaving through their varying careers to investigate the inconsistencies of Hollywood itself. Puncturing holes in its immaculate veneer, the artist posits that the structure of Hollywood is both faulty and essentially human, and the absorption of success and failure should instead be considered requisites for ingenuity and innovation beyond the cinema.
Da Corte creates sculptures out of repurposed materials collected from retail stores and various locales in his travels. He identifies his process as a form of cultural anthropology, utilizing modest, found materials that point to our intimate relationship with discardable items, asking us what these consumer objects reveal about our recent past and what direction we are headed. Toying with ideas of taste, Da Corte proposes that failure is in fact an essential component of risk and rule breaking; and the celebration and acknowledgment of flaws in a milieu that scorns and dismisses imperfection can resuscitate a vernacular from moments previous. His sculptures maintain traces of their past lives, reviving lost narratives while exposing the capacity of mass-produced objects to be surrogates for power, sex and happiness.
Talks & Events
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ALEX DA CORTE
May 4, 2013Artist Alex Da Corte will discuss his exhibition Bacon Brest at Artspeak.