I began viewing Alexandra Derderian’s work backward, beginning from right to left, later realizing I maybe was supposed to start at the entrance and made my way around.
This leads me to the ‘T-Shirt Series’ of the exhibit where Derderian reflects on her adolescent experience of owning and wearing large tie-dyed shirts that she used to hide her body, a way of obstructing her developing female form. The drawing paintings hang on the wall, like memento mori of the 1960’s psychedelic band shirts. Gender roles are turned on their head creating a easy access for viewers to enter the work by presenting icons like t-shirts, and specifically male sized ones, everyone either owned or knew someone who wore these shirts. Below the series, a drawing of Market Basket plastic bags is piled high surrounded by a flower-like background. I see this paring of shirts and plastic shopping bags as a way to point to the consumption of cultural icons like tie-dyed t-shirts and food.
Throughout Derderian’s exhibit, there is an echo nostalgia, a capturing and presenting of bits and pieces of the past like stashed away cosmetics in a teenager’s Caboodle like Mary Kay lotions or Clearasil cleansing pads. The piece above titled Objects from my Bathroom Drawer, she draws the contents of the rituals of her every day, but what day is she recording? Those details are blurry like the aesthetics of her drawings. While asking Derderian to speak about her work she told me that each piece of work holds something of a past memory or a symbol that helps to keep her present to counteract the dissociative way she moves through her life.
In The Swimmer a 4-channel video piece, she edited together 5 years of moments of going to the beach, with a text of journal entries layered atop the footage. The text moves quickly across the screen, scanning, and searching, as the ocean is still and flowing. On the top television is taped a transparency of a computer screen, a blank word document waiting to be filled with thoughts and experiences. As she states, ‘Each successive screen, as well as the transparent images that obscure them, show an image of some object or action—journaling, a blank word document—attempts by the artist to relive the conscious moment second hand. Each successive screen is a step deeper into the artist’s dissociative state.’
The 1-channel MRI video depicts a brain scan and Derderian explained it was from her ‘experience of participating in a research study at McLean Hospital on Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) in 2014. During the study, the artist was shown quickly-scrolling images of strangers’ faces expressing different emotions, while the MRI machine generated images of the brain’s physiological reactions.’ She injected an image of herself with one of her tied-dyed t-shirts, mimicking the expressions she was shown during the study. Flashing on and off the screen atop the changing brain scan, it is a kind of meme mixed with a real medical video. A strange juxtaposition of the real and constructed media.
In another piece where there is a juxtaposition of the real and constructed is in That Oyster Anecdote where there is an overhead projector casting a huge image of an oyster on the wall and a vibrator connected to it. The piece was on a 15-minute cycle, the vibrator would shake the image and eventually stop after 1 min. and then the image would also go out after 5 min. This was a nice addition to the exhibit because I feel it tied directly to the feminine body in addition to speaking to public display of female exotic pleasure.
This being the first comprehensive of Alexandra Derderian’s work it was a great opportunity to get to see an exhibit that was both sincere and nice to see the approach taken in different perspectives of media and imagery. To find out more about Alexandra Derderian’s work you can visit her website at: http://www.alexandraderderian.com/
[This exhibition was on view June 05-June 30th, 2018. ]