Artists: Alexandra Metcalf
Exhibition title: Room 131
Venue: Ginny Projects, The Knights Inn Motel, Seekonk, US
Date: July 15 – 20, 2016
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Ginny Projects
1997. Already riddled with fear. Crawled into older sisters bed. Lay on the side of the bed nearest the window. Sister sleeps on the edge of the bed. Never want to be near the door, first to be spooked or worse. Sister fast asleep while the door wide open looked out to a landing and then the carpeted stairs continued to the attic bedroom, where the eldest sister once resided. Yet she had long since moved to America, a dark coldness forever stuck there. When the house was viewed from the street outside all electrical wires converged and met at a point right outside her window. Electrical. Sister asleep, if eyes were to open all she would see would be the left side of her white wooden desk, completely blocked from any dangers coming from the ajar door. The perspective from the safer, near the window, position allowed for a first row seat to the carpeted stairs and the dark cool mass coming from the attic room. In the midst of the mantra eyes glanced skittishly to the open door. There stood the Hat Man..
2016. Fantasy relays that knights save. A knight has duties. A knight protects. A half baked knight getting high forgetting his tasks is held up in a motel room. He’s riddled with self-guilt and worthlessness, oh to be born into a lineage of greatness and to be but the one that fails. This is the one that can’t but rather shivers at the site of any quest. The Knight’s reality. Enters the Shadow Man. The Angel of Death he wonders? Oh how lovely that might be? A friend from somewhere else perhaps, Someone passing through maybe with some wisdom of his own to pass on to this hopeless fellow. His hallucinations intensify. His swords taking form of some Other Land. The Hat Man he wonders. I can’t sleep a wink. I need to get rid of this feeling. I’m afraid of the night.
Ginny Projects is pleased to announce it’s debut outing with Alexandra Metcalf. The works within the installation use the setting of the The Knights Inn and the world of video games to explore Alexandra’s nightmares, both old and new. The personal narrative, her sleep paralysis, comes alive in the room which she stayed in for the duration of the show.
Alexandra Metcalf (b. 1992, London) completed a BFA in Fine Art at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2015. Recent exhibitions of Alex’s work include Huttendasein, 15 Orient, New York (2016), Expo, MX Gallery, New York (2015) and Sullivan, Expose Gallery, Providence (2015).
