Awaiting visitors on MOCA’s second floor is a dreamlike environment envisioned by Venezuelan American artist Alex Da Corte. Vivid and surreal, Da Corte’s art is culled from popular culture, sexuality, violence, cinema, children’s literature, and art and design history, lending his work a certain familiarity. Within his wild imagination, however, popular symbols are stretched, shrunken, and softened, opening new ways of interpreting them and their cultural significance. 

Moving image works are often at the center of Da Corte’s installations. Playing both director and leading actor in his sleekly executed films, the artist morphs into his subjects, fashioning himself into characters like Mister Rogers, Sleeping Beauty, Marcel Duchamp, and the Wicked Witch of the West. By slipping into the shoes of someone from whom generations have learned right from wrong and good from evil, Da Corte searches for each character’s complexity, proposing alternative views of the short stories and protagonists we’ve been conditioned to love and despise. 

For MOCA, Da Corte has reimagined his 2018 film Rubber Pencil Devil across several large-scale multicolor rear-projection cubes. This immersive work is countered by Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear), a newly realized work and intimate experience that invites viewers into the mind of Da Corte by way of his collected obsessions. While being intensely personal, the Mouse Museum evokes the power and boundlessness of the human imagination. The interior of the structure is dark; an illuminated vitrine spans the walls like a film strip: “life as a moving image,” Da Corte notes.