June 2011
La Petite Mort Gallery presents:
ALEJANDRO HUGO DORDA MEVS
aka AXEL VOID
MEDIOCRE
Paintings, Drawings & Mural.
One Month Exhibit
June 3 – 26, 2011
This project is funded in part through a U.S. Department of State,
U.S. Embassy-Ottawa Public Affairs Section Grant.
Vernissage Friday June 3 / 7 – 10pm
Beats by DJ JAS NASTY
Proudly sponsored by CKCU 93.1 FM & MERCURY
Workshop: Saturday June 4, 2011
The artist, who currently resides in Berlin, Germany, will be in attendance on opening night.
“Every time a man is begotten and born, the clock of human
life is wound up anew to repeat once more its same old tune that has already been played innumerable times, movement by movement and measure by measure, with insignificant variations.” – Arthur Schopenhau
ARTIST STATEMENT
Mediocre is a series of expositions, actions, murals, and various types of intervention, each one a complementary part of the whole, while keeping its individual reading. From an analytic and existentialist standpoint, Mediocre exposes different aspects of the everyday—the day-to-day of the people that make up an intrahistory, the history of those who don’t appear in textbooks, those who go undocumented and form a part of the enormous group we call the people.
It examines various themes, seeking out the extremes that emerge in distinct cultures and contexts. It is possible to separate these extremes into three categories: the positive, the negative, and the neutral. The positive refers to pleasure and beauty, the negative to violence, death, and tragedy, and the neutral (also considered an extreme) is the absence of both. These concepts are equivocal: from cynical, nihilist or pessimist, to vitalist or even romantic, these interpretations can change depending on the observer.
Mediocre in Ottawa will present a selection of works and a workshop. The exact images and themes of the selected works were chosen at random, yet fall into the Mediocre concept. The workshop will be comprised of people in the city from different backgrounds (homeless, addicts, housewives, and working class people, to name a few) interpreting the theme through their own paintings. These works will also be exposed and put up for sale in the Mediocre show at Le Petite Mort Gallery.
BIO:
Alejandro Hugo Dorda Mevs, also known as Axel Void, was born in Miami in 1986 to a Spanish father and Haitian mother. The hectic, unstable and ever-changing atmosphere in which Alex was raised, influenced his way of understanding things along with his way of representing them.
At 3 years old Alex went to live in Cadiz with his mother, where he had to get used to living in several places for short periods of time.
When Alex was 10 years old, his Haitian grandfather came home with a saxophone for him that he bought for nine dollars. This is where his passion for music began. A few years later this passion was accompanied by his career as a painter. Along with the saxophone Alex plays the sideflute, clarinet and piano. He has also played and recorded with various jazz, funk-rock, electronic, rap and experimental music groups and bands.
Alex began to teach himself to paint at very young age. In 1999 he was introduced to the graffiti world, which influenced his forms of expression as well as the conception of his work taking a parallel path with the commercial world of contemporary art.
At 16 Alex’s mother returned to Miami, and Alex decided to stay in Cadiz and maintained a kind of nomadic and solitary lifestyle. Afterwards, he lived between Granada, and Sevilla, where he still lives, maintaining the rhythm of frequent travel, painting, and music.
Alex’s pseudonym comes from the compostion of his work: the juxtaposition of form and emptiness, silence and sound, and Void’s way of combining and confusing empty space with closed space.
Alex has always lived in environments where drugs were present, which in combination with experiences suffered in his family, brought about in Alex a rejection of substances and “pseudo life”. This rejection and his concept of “Home” are two of the most recurring themes in Void’s work. It can be said, however, that its not so much these themes that call attention, so much as the dynamism of his work–ambiguity, discomfort, unease, are some of the most fundamental features of Alex’s work, which moreso than give any clearcut messages, his work clouds them, raising more questions and doubt than answers. – J. Carmona
Thank you,
Guy Berube, director
La Petite Mort Gallery