Featured in Alex Da Corte’s Nostalgia for Pop
For his first solo exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, the artist riffs on the iconographies and hierarchies of a bygone era
Across video, painting and immersive installations, Philadelphia-based artist Alex Da Corte plays with visual trickery and theoretical allusion to both savour and disrupt the shiny surfaces of popular culture. For his first solo exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, ‘Helter Shelter or: The Red Show! Or …’, the artist derives part of his title from a 1955 Woody Woodpecker cartoon. The phrase, Da Corte informs us in the exhibition text, riffs on ‘Helter Skelter’, a ‘British word that means confusion or disorder’, which also happens to be the title of a 1968 Beatles song, a 1974 novel about the Manson Family murders, and the name of a children’s slide. Word play leads to a chain of associations that, rather than cohere, proliferate through addition and substitution: an animation, a song, a murd