Alex Da Corte

Da Corte found inspiration in Leonard Cohen's music, particularly the 1974 song "Chelsea Hotel #2," after which he named his breakthrough video in 2010. Filmed on a cellphone, Chelsea Hotel No. 2 takes place against a white backdrop that highlights the vibrant colors of random objects and foodstuffs Da Corte manipulates in front of the camera. His hands—covered in flour, ground coffee, sequins, packing tape, or aluminum foil—enter and exit the frame to perform a series of bizarre tasks. He stacks and presses slices of bread, squeezes purple dish soap into a neon green hamper, peels a banana with a gold hoop, rolls a calla lily into green bubble wrap, cuts bologna with large rusty scissors, and paints unripe cherries with red nail polish. We also see a gilded head of lettuce sprouting a rose on top of an overturned yellow basket and the fall of a standing broom and a blue chair as one of its legs is pulled out.

"Will the real Slim Shady please stand up?" sang the rapper known to his estranged mother as Marshall Bruce Mathers III, but better known to the rest of us as Eminem. That the Philadelphia-based artist Alex Da Corte was attracted to the early-noughties icon is perhaps unsurprising, given Da Corte’s long-held interest in artifice and pop culture, masking and makeup. After a friend noted a passing resemblance, Da Corte started to ‘embody’ the persona of the musician, not least bleaching his hair, in the hope that by taking on these outward signifiers, he might better understand a figure whose politics Da Corte profoundly disagreed with.

A whimsical, highly stylized film in 57 chapters inspired by a wide range of pop culture references.