Alix Pearlstein

Biography

In work that includes conceptual sculpture, multi-channel installation, and performance-based video, Alix Pearlstein uses everyday objects, pop cultural artifacts, and art historical references to create narrative meaning through association. Characterized by deadpan humor and a minimalist aesthetic, Pearlstein's approach is direct and intimate. Her videotapes engage in wry, self-conscious renderings of icons of style, gender, media, and art historical Modernism.

Pearlstein's earliest videos exhibit a deliberately low-tech, grunge sensibility that is countered by the cool, stylized elegance of her more recent works. Throughout these works, Pearlstein appears as performer, adopting ironic postures and role-playing to tweak the images and codes that signify female identity in a media-based culture.

Her more recent videos, which feature groups of actors, function as abstract dramas operating in a realm between the theatrical and the cinematic. They examine behavior, relationships, group dynamics and social constructs. Informed by an exploration of performative strategies, these works, often set in an indeterminate void, condense psychological narrative to create a heightened reality.

Alix Pearlstein was born in 1962 in New York. She received her B.S. from Cornell University and her M.F.A. from the State University of New York. She has received awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Art Matters Inc., the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and the McDowell Colony. Her works have been included in group exhibitions at the Biennale de Lyon, France; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Kunstverein, Cologne; S.M.A.K., Ghent, Belgium, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others. One-person exhibitions of her work have been presented at The Kitchen, New York; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Postmasters Gallery, Artemis Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, and On Stellar Rays, New York; and The Grossman Gallery, School of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Pearlstein lives in New York.