Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive presents D-L Alvarez MATRIX 243, an exhibition on view July 18–October 7, 2012.
D-L Alvarez’s first solo museum exhibition presents a haunting meditation on the violent end of innocence. The artist focuses on the uncanny moments when social and domestic deviance collides.
In Alvarez’s drawing series, The Closet (2006–07), we see an abstracted image of Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode in Halloween (1978), repelling the attacks of a masked psychopath while trapped in a closet. The character’s expression of horror is echoed by the drawings’ highly fractured compositions, which appear to be the result of some kind of electronic interference or degraded technology. The Closet is shown with Something to Cry About (I) and (II) (2007), patchwork bodysuits made of children’s clothing arranged over wooden armatures. The ominous draping is both vulnerable and sinister, evoking the footed pajamas of cartoon-addled kids as well as the grisly outfits and other mementoes that the notorious murderer Ed Gein fashioned out of corpses’ skins.
With these two projects, Alvarez explores the aesthetic guises that sometimes mask unspeakable horrors. His drawings and sculptures conjure the psychic breaks that both constitute and disrupt identity.
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive,
University of California (BAM/PFA)
Woo Hon Fai Hall
2625 Durant Ave. #2250
Berkeley, CA 94720-2250
Hours: Wed–Sun, 11–5pm
Open until 9pm on L@TE Fridays
T 510 642 0808
www.bampfa.berkeley.edu