Alex Da Corte: ROY G BIV
Wed, Apr 20, 2022
10:30 am
Alex Da Corte, ROY G BIV, 2022. Video, color, sound; 60 min., with wood box with back-projected screen, paint, performance, and powder-coated chairs. Courtesy the artist; Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and Los Angeles; and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photograph by Ron Amstutz
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Floor 5
Alex Da Corte’s (b. 1980) ROY G BIV is both a video installation and an ongoing performance. The cubical structure onto which Da Corte’s video is projected will be painted a series of colors by Americo Da Corte, the artist’s brother who is a professional housepainter. The performance riffs on John Baldessari’s video Six Colorful Inside Jobs (1977), for which the artist painted the inside of a room one color per day for six days, and brings the emotional labor and color journey of ROY G BIV into the viewer's space. Similarly, Da Corte’s performance functions as both a color study and a demonstration of craft.
The video projected onto the cube recreates 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.
Wednesday, April 20
10:30 am
Thursday, May 12
10:30 am
Friday, June 3
10:30 am
Saturday, June 25
11 am
Sunday, July 17
11 am
Monday, August 8
10:30 am
View all performances in the 2022 Whitney Biennial.
