Alex Da Corte (b. 1980, Camden, N.J.) lives and works in Philadelphia. Da Corte has exhibited solo shows at White Cube, London, Carl Kostyal, Stockholm, and David Risley, Copenhagen (all 2014), the Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, Maine, and Joe Sheftel Gallery, New York (both 2013), among others. His work has also been part of group shows at galleries and institutions including Mitchell Innes + Nash, New York (2014), Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis (2010), and MoMA PS1, New York (2009). This September he will show Eastern Sports, a collaborative project with Jayson Musson, at ICA Philadelphia. He received his BFA from the University of the Arts and his MFA from Yale University in 2012. Jayson Musson (b. 1977) received his BFA in Photography from the University of Arts, Philadelphia and his MFA in Painting from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions including Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, Texas, The Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and the Grimmuseum in Berlin. He is currently working on a children’s book published by Paul Chan’s Badlands Unlimited and a play produced by Grand Arts in Kansas City, MO. Jayson Musson lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Alex Da Corte and Jayson Musson are longtime friends and recent collaborators. Their commission for ♥ Like: A BOFFO Instagram Project begins with a significant shared inspiration: vernaculars of the street. For Da Corte, the creative re-purposing of common goods for pragmatic ends is a crucial influence (and a mainstay of his Philadelphia neighborhood). His documentation of these inventive gestures approaches them as moments of ingenuity and necessity; the eventual incorporation of this ethos into his sculpture is more a reproduction of intent than a contextual hedge. Importantly, Da Corte and Musson don’t lose sight of the essential humor and poetry of the street, of consumer detritus and its absurd round-trips through cycles of use-value. Musson’s humorous engagement of street culture often pursues its varied manifestations in social media. As a catalog of personal desires and self-reflections and an extended revel in the inventions and delusions of contemporary humans, his observational use of Instagram makes few material distinctions: Twitter screenshots and first-gen snapshots share equal stage, producing a digital-physical leveling that privileges affect over medium. Da Corte and Musson’s collaborative Instagram commission emphasizes the urgency with which users attempt to represent and create worlds within the parameters of the platform— making (and posting) things out of an essential desire to create.
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