Alex da Corte – Bad Land

If Nicki Minaj owned and art-directed The Black Lodge from Twin Peaks perhaps we’d get somewhere close to Bad Land, the 4-room shrine to neon and plastic that US visual artist Alex da Corte has installed in Fitzrovia’s Josh Lilley Gallery.

Navigating the show is like walking through a Rubik’s Cube x Nerds candy dollhouse, and if you’re alone it feels even more like you’re wandering through the set of a film based on something that you convince yourself (and everyone else) is true but deep, deep down you know it’s just a big chubby lie.

…Er, yeah. It’s a bit trippy on your own. Footsteps muffled by pillowy carpet, a huge deconstructed Adidas shoe lurking like an unusually incongruent and massive object you sidle round in a Crash Bandicoot video game, that lingering smell of varnish.
Careful you don’t get too high just from looking at the resourcefully-made selection of bongs crafted from Tic Tac packets and detergent bottles, laden across a table of dimensions that would remind everyone of their university days.

Three basement rooms are each anchored by a TV screen on which the artist impersonates Eminem and indulges in weird plastic exploits that go from sorting PS1 controllers in an orderly fashion to smearing gloopy mustard all over himself under the watchful blinking lights of a huge crown.
Feels a bit like a chronicling of Kanye West’s career, then.

Da Corte recently directed music video for St. Vincent’s track New York, which provides a warming aperitif to the thick colourful sludge of the show, so cheqqit aaaawt.