Author Description

Focusing on the past decade of Da Corte's career, this exhibition features more than forty paintings, several drawings, and a video that considers painting as a performative act. Da Corte is globally recognized for his hybrid installations marrying painting, performance, video, and sculpture. Immersed in the history of art, design, and pop culture, Da Corte's combinations evoke mixed feelings, such as fantasy and malice, while crossing hierarchies of high and low culture. His works combine modernist color theory and the spatial experiments of post-minimalist sculpture to consider topics including consumerism, persona, sex, invisible labor, taste, power, and desire. The exhibition's title, The Whale, illustrates the artist's vast mining of contemporary culture, a process that Da Corte describes as "analogous to the Jungian night sea journey, looking backward and collecting the past as an act of commingling with spirits, either cultural or personal." This concept, drawn from the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, relates to myths in which the hero is devoured by a sea monster--a whale--and descends into a land of ghosts, e.g. Hades, or Hell, in the quest for individuality. Da Corte sees the medium of painting as "a cavity for these ghosts"--much like museums themselves. Painting, forever brimming with the weight of its own history and historically itself an uncanny threshold of consumption, represents "the mouth of the whale" to Da Corte. The artist situates himself here, within a crowded, beautiful trash-scape of contemporary culture, digesting advertisements, animation cels, compact disc graphic design, art history, and more. The ephemeral pop culture source materials referenced in Da Corte's paintings make evident how the things we identify with--or use to define us--evolve over time. To realize this reconstructed vision of painting, Da Corte stretches the medium's traditional boundaries. The exhibition incorporates Puffy Paintings in stuffed, upholstered neoprene, Sham