Review: Alex Da Corte at MASS MoCA

​        I’m taking a short break from my “How to Stay Sane as an Artist and Art Teacher” series to review an art exhibition on display at MASS MoCA now through January 2017: Alex Da Corte’s Free Roses.
       For those who haven’t been, MASS MoCA is an art center composed of a building complex that used to be an old textile mill. They bring contemporary and thought provoking, yet accessible artists to work with the architecture and massive spaces instead of simply filling a traditional gallery setting.

​        Prior to Da Corte’s exhibition, I saw Richard Nonas in Building Nine, a mammoth, football-field-sized space. In any Chelsea gallery I’d have called the minimal wood and metal studies serene, but in the grand hall of the old textile mill they were overwhelmed and disappointing. Even the long arch of sloping, weathered railroad ties was dwarfed. 

        I opened the door to Alex Da Corte’s Free Roses, stepped in, and was swallowed whole. Plush, vibrant purple carpet falls underfoot and climbs up the walls, and varying electric glows emanate from every room with mesmerizing sounds and music.

        ​At first the exhibit seems too much to process in its variety, from large collages, neon smiling and frowning sculptures, to video of bread being stacked. The next room holds a rotating, acid-red snake made of fake nails and gems gleaming in the darkness. Everyday items are made giant, or pulled apart into odd fragments that take on new roles. Motorized components bring life to sculptures as a pair of plastic swans swim endlessly on neon-pink lit liquid, and a droning mechanical bat circles pedestals of found object sculptures.

        ​Traveling through the second floor gallery is mesmerizing and disorienting as sur-reality envelops and pulls the viewer from room to room. Threads start to form across the exhibition of fantasy, created identity, and psychological narrative. A couch-sized pair of red lips holds a long silver cigarette, and nearby a giant spider peers out menacingly from a car-sized tissue box. 

        Da Corte recontextualizes Joseph Beuys’ Lighting with Stag in Its Glare in a way that should have been so all along. Beuys’ sculpture is a massive triangular form of rough metal surrounded by smaller, lumpy forms that had been off to one side of a room and came off as boring or overly cryptic. Now the piece is centered in the large, darkened room and flanked by intense green pillars of light, with haunting sound in the background. The piece takes on the mystical feeling and raw animal energy it seems intended to have.

        ​A ten-year span of work is united by a rabid obsession with consumer culture and desire, and framed wonderfully in the exhibition’s attention to surface and lighting.

        ​Next week I’ll return to my How to Stay Sane as an Artist and Art Teacher series, but in the meantime, get out and see some art! It’s a great way to re-set and refresh before getting back to work. 

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