Alex McQuilkin

Lives and works in Binghamton, NY

Artist statement

My artwork is about how codes of femininity are learned, performed, and enforced across a woman’s life, and how they travel through every register of image culture, from home décor to perfume commercials. I painstakingly paint facsimiles of mass-produced wallpapers that carry gendered instruction. Through the absurd gesture of re-creating these mechanical prints by hand, I draw their function into clear view. These patterns come from rooms my mother built for me, friends’ houses, and 1980s and 1990s film and television bedroom sets. Against these patterns I set a photographic image of a woman from film, advertising, or art history. The decorated surface and the coded female figure belong to one system. That system is my subject, slowed until the authorship behind imagery we experience as authorless becomes visible. A monochrome palette holds the two images together, gesturing toward the seamlessness of gender coding. The paintings also reveal their own making. The trompe l’oeil wallpaper is left unfinished and the photographic image repeatedly degraded, with paint standing in for pixelation, underscoring the impossibility of living up to gender ideals. My videos do the same work by repetition rather than by hand. Running Away/Looking Back loops one cinematic cliché, a girl running from the camera while glancing back, prey in horror films and fantasy in advertising. Repeated and intercut, the two uses become indistinguishable and the shot tips into absurdity, where it fails...

Artwork