Alix Pearlstein / Interiors

About

Produced and first exhibited in 1996, INTERIORS comprises a video, thirteen collages, and a viewing zone. Pearlstein re-stages the exhibition at ASHES/ASHES, adapted for 2019.

The video, “Interiors”, features six looping scenes starring Pearlstein in various guises: a white cat, the Playboy Party Jokes girl, an artist, the matriarch of a family of four, a statue, and the Energizer Bunny. In a 1996 TONY review, Bill Arning writes "I first thought her progression of personae was some sort of chronology of the roles women assume at various points in their lives, but that didn't quite work; these images are too much like media hallucinations to be habitable as identities”. Pearlstein’s characters transform through embodiment, role-play, choreographed action, gesture and language. Each action culminates in a pose with a direct address to the camera and the viewer. Grounded in the intimate studio approaches to performance-based video of the late 1960s to 1970s, the monitor as mirror acts here as site and stage, at once reflective and reflexive. “Interiors” is the first of Pearlstein’s video works set in a void space, a space outside of time and context other than what is enacted and composed within the frame. Posited here as a blank page, Pearlstein compressesthe planes of analog video. The minimal sets were constructed from paper, and props from readymade and fabricated objects which function as narrative link and structural device. From one scene to the next, the sets retain a single carry-over element, proffering re-decorating through re-purposing.