A larger-than-life still from Alex Da Corte’s film Rubber Pencil Devil has transformed MOCA’s lightbox. The film, vivid and surreal, spans 57 chapters with “a bunch of old faces” that Da Corte has “recycled into a fresh variety show.” The familiar faces are characters we know, from music, television, and movies: Bugs Bunny, Madonna, Gene Kelly, and Pink Panther. Da Corte plays nearly all of them, enacting fantasies and rituals that incorporate mystic objects likewise drawn from a cultural treasure chest.
Themes and motifs reappear in Da Corte’s short vignettes, leaving viewers to grapple with this out-of-step version of a familiar world. In this particular still, Pink Panther is depicted carrying a single daisy—a flower often seen as an oracle of true love. The daisy, uprooted, wilting, and draped over his shoulders as he moves across the screen, evokes themes of cruelty, defeat, rescue, and sacrifice.
This work is a unique extension of Alex Da Corte’s solo exhibition, Ear Worm, currently on view on Floor 2 of the museum.
About the Alex Da Corte
Alex Da Corte lives and works in Philadelphia. His work has been the subject of several institutional solo exhibitions, the most recent being his 20-year retrospective, Mr. Remember, at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Humlebæk, Denmark), 2022–23 and the video survey, Fresh Hell, at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art (Kanazawa, Japan), 2023. Da Corte was selected for the Roof Garden Commission for the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) in 2021. Da Corte’s work has been included in prestigious group exhibitions such the Whitney Biennial Quiet as It’s Kept, 2022; the Biennale di Venezia May You Live in Interesting Times (Venice), 2019, and the 57th Carnegie International (Pittsburgh), 2019.
Recent critical writing includes catalogue essays for the international touring exhibitions Marisol: A Retrospective and Ellsworth Kelly at 100. In 2026, with the Whitney Museum’s Meg Onli and Scott Rothkopf, Da Corte will co-curate the first Roy Lichtenstein retrospective in New York in more than 30 years. Da Corte was the 2023 Philip Guston Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.
