(Los Angeles, CA) - 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). Alex Da Corte: A Season in He’ll will be on view July 9–September 17, 2016 at Art + Practice in Leimert Park. 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.
