Alex McQuilkin

I Wish I Was a Beam of Light

May 09 –June 20, 2009
Opening May 08, 2009
6 - 9 pm

The exhibition “I Wish I Was a Beam of Light” that takes place at Gallery Adler in Frankfurt from May 09 until June 20 shows new works by the American artist Alex McQuilkin. The exhibition title derives from an episode of the TV-show “South Park” in which one of the characters, mortified by the impending prospect of having to kiss his girlfriend, wishes to be free of his corporeal existence. The exhibition, a selection of new video, sculptural and collage works, is an ongoing examination of this tragicomic existence and of ever-repeated hopes and failures to tease transcendence out of it.

“Joan of Arc” - the artist’s first two-channel video work - examines the martyrdom of the French heroine through the performance of actress Maria Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 film, La Passion de Jeanne d’ Arc. Selections from Falconetti’s brutal re-enactment are projected in black and white parallel to the artist’s full color video re-enactment of Falconetti. The left channel displays Dreyer’s infamous close ups on the anguished face of Falconetti embodying the figure of Joan of Arc while in the right channel McQuilkin appears methodically cutting and then shaving her long strawberry-blond hair in an attempt to channel some sort of spiritual or emotional transcendence through this physical alteration. The trance is broken repeatedly by the artist’s adjustment of the camera and distracted staring at herself in the viewfinder. Idyllic images of nature and of the church, the very images Dreyer imagined the historic Joan might have looked towards as the flames engulfed her, are interposed sporadically in the left frame. Towards the end of the five and a half minute video, while McQuilkin continues her heartfelt attempt at a heartfelt merging with either Falconetti or Joan herself - the confusion about which is narrated bluntly in the artist’s voice over- a scull appears in the left frame, a worm crawling out of its eye, bringing to mind Shakespearian allusions to the ephemerality of life.

Throughout McQuilkin’s work, the process of self-identification always means self-discovery through another person. And the adaption of another one’s habit always turns out to require the rejection, even the obliteration of one’s own self. McQuilkin pairs philosophical questions of identity and truth with dreamy hopes and seemingly naïve faith so often attributed to the adolescent and the mad. The anxiety of bodily identity continues in the installation “Untitled (Escape Route)”. The artist wove her shorn hair into a seventeen - foot long and half - inch diameter rope that, now attached to a polished steel ring, is screwed into the gallery’s ceiling. The hanging hair is a symbol, a freeze frame for a preceding life - a life that the artist, now that the hair isn’t a part of her any longer, beholds from the an outside perspective as a ghost of a former identity - much as Hamlet beheld the skull of the former joker. The rope, as suggested by its title, reflects both the emotion of former safety, a Rapunzelian promise of escape as well as the anxiety of the potential choice of escape via the noose.

The artist’s most recent video, “I Wish I Was a Beam of Light”, continues the artist’s approach of searching for meaning through cinematic fantasy. Utilizing Roman Polanski’s 1965 psycho-thriller “Repulsion”, McQuilkin once again attempts transcendence, this time through the actress Catherine Deneuve who in Polanski’s film embodies the figure of psychologically and sexually deranged Carole Ledoux. McQuilkin places herself before her camera in the posture of the near comatose Ledoux, lying on her bed beneath a solitary beam of light, paralyzed and traumatized by the barely perceptible sounds of her sister’s sexual encounters in the room above her. The artist physically blends footage of herself with that of Deneuve, alternating the intensity of each so that one is not sure if what he sees is McQuilkin trying to emerge through the face of Deneuve or vice versa.

Like in “Joan of Arc” - although with another accentuation - McQuilkin’s affinity to the issue of one’s identity and the desire to escape it through either fantasy or something greater is reflected. What does it mean to lose your identity?  The mental distress and the psychic disruption that actress Catherine Deneuve impersonating Ledoux and the artist through her emotional adaption bring to the boil, give a gruesome and unsettling answer to this question. In this sense - so the artist’s opinion - only the sentiment “I Wish I Was a Beam of Light” remains.

Alex McQuilkin

"Tragically sweet"

September, 3 - November, 6, 2004
opening reception: Friday 3rd, September 2004, 19pm

 

Frankfurt am Main, April 2004 – Alex McQuilkin’s debut video, ‘Fucked’, sold out on opening night at the 2002 Armory show in New York City, generating mixed attention and launching the young artist into the American art scene. In Europe her exhibitions had somewhat different side effects: in Belgium she was asked to sign papers certifying that she was 18 years old after confiscating her video mistakenly as child pornography.

For the first time in Germany, Ulrike Adler will present the videos and photographs of Alex McQuilkin in her first solo exhibition, ‘Tragically Sweet’. Beginning September 3, McQuilkin provokes, dances and bleeds in Frankfurt’s Galerie Adler. The 24 year old American performs the characters in most of her stories as she explores the drama and experience of American youth culture. Appearing to barely have outgrown adolescence herself, McQuilkin turns her camera nostalgically at herself and the romanticism and image based mindset closely associated with the teenage years. “Youth is a time when we allow ourselves to be influenced – when rock stars are unfaltering gods. Things feel immediate and unfiltered even if they aren’t.” states the young artist.

Drastically and at the same time subtly McQuilkin shows us that reality and imagination merge more often than we realize. In front of a Kurt Cobain poster one girl dances herself to ecstacy while another admires her own reflection as she bleeds to death, her wrists clad in blood soaked gauze and jewels: a sort of suicide chic. McQuilkin plays with an aesthetic that lingers between the pseudo-hardcore of a pop-punk music video and the girly debutante world of pink ribbons and lace. The work by the younges artist in the Gallery Adler program gives a visual representation of symbols and characteristics known universally: Movement of the hips as female contest, sex as secret masochism and exaggerated self production as pseudo-sensualism.

Despite the loaded content, the interest of the artist remains in the imagery, in the pictures themselves: underlined by the film-stills cut from the videos and transformed into C-Prints. Eventually the content serves as the base which sharpens the senses of the viewer. McQuilkin crosses borders: the romantic or trivial suddenly tips over to the dramatic and tragic. The young artist produces feelings in her videos which extend deep into the entrails. That’s life and McQuilkin quotes Buffy the Vampire Slayer: “I understand why vampires suck blood: they just want to feel alive.” McQuilkin’s work is a reminder of this intense and desperate need for immediate experience.