While visiting North Adams, Massachusetts last weekend, I found myself wandering through a variety of art exhibits and installations at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA). The museum, located in a converted factory building complex, contains various diverse and fascinating exhibits and installations, created by a variety of artists across the globe. Each corner I turned was a new experience — a new space manipulated and modified to represent a world envisioned by the particular artist behind it.

After listening to the echo of my voice and the thumps of my footsteps in Richard Nonas’s "The Man in the Empty Space," poking golden cracks in the pavement that I later realized were a part of Rachel Sussman’s The Space Between (a collaborative work between her and other artists), and traveling back in time and space through Michael Oatman’s All Utopias Fell, I found myself transfixed by a series of rooms that looked and felt as if they had dropped straight out of a David Lynch film. I had entered Alex Da Corte’s "Free Roses," a multi-room exhibit replicating Da Corte’s internal world, as well as the one we as viewers and consumers are consistently surrounded by. With the use of sound, color, texture, and light, Da Corte creates a terrifying, surreal world — designed to entice, unease, and captivate the viewer.

Da Corte was born in Camden, New Jersey, and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Printmaking/Fine Arts from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, before going on to receive a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University. Da Corte has always found himself drawn to the idea of combining abstract, aesthetically pleasing, and contemporary design to create a world of his own, and has always been attracted to items he doesn’t particularly understand or care for. The title of his exhibition, "Free Roses," is inspired by a long term dream of Da Corte’s to purchase roses from a street vendor in Philadelphia and hand them out for free.

Upon entering the exhibit, the first portion I encountered was a glowing, carpeted, lavender room. The room has a feeling of softness to it, almost like a child’s playroom, and contains a variety of miscellaneous items you could find at your local dollar store — most notably a soft, plush burger with a black bun that I tripped over two or three times (likely placed there to represent the controversial black bun Burger King used this past Halloween). Stacked against the wall are plastic paintings comprised of more everyday items, created to represent the flattening of three-dimensional objects into two-dimensional ones by the screens we look at daily.

Alex Da Corte's first section of "Free Roses" (Photo/Hannah Breisinger)

Branching off of that room are multiple video installations, with the first being "Easternsports": a warmly lit, four-panel video exhibit complete with dazzling music, scattered oranges on the ground, and the lingering scent of citrus. Another video installation, shown in a mirror-tiled room covered in broken eggs, displays Da Corte manipulating ordinary objects and food items. The final video installation is in a Coca-Cola themed tile room, and the video, "Chelsea Hotel No. 2," displays a pair of hands touching colorful and aesthetically pleasing objects and food items in unconventional ways — cutting a piece of bologna with scissors, sticking raspberries onto flour-coated fingertips (uncannily resembling a jelly doughnut). This video was my favorite part of the exhibit, and despite these ordinary objects being handled and manipulated in an discomforting or unusual way (and contrasted with a song that’s familiar and comforting to most people, including myself), I found the video’s movement, color, and texture soothing and beautiful to watch, and resisted the urge to stay in that room the entire day. At the back of the room is a long hoagie cast out of rubber, displayed in an almost honorary fashion.

Alex Da Corte and Jayson Musson's "Easternsports" (Photo/Hannah Breisinger)

Finally, in the main portion of the installation is "Lightning," a room complete with colorful neon ceiling light fixtures, and eight carpeted sections or zones. The eight sections are designed to represent a suburban home, and each section contains ordinary objects such as soda cans, shampoo bottles, and food arranged in an organized, yet chaotic fashion. The room is designed to represent values that we’re surrounded by, such as wealth, love, despair, and horror, and, comprised of familiar items organized in bizarre or unusual ways, is quite similar to a dream. The scene that stuck with me the most was a carpeted area with a moving, masked dog, complete with drool dangling from its mouth and lifeless, disturbing eyes. Upon closer glance, I noticed a plastic, bitten off arm next to the dog with a gloved hand attached to it, exemplifying the shock-value of the piece. The dog is an Akita — the same type of dog that witnessed Nicole Brown Simpson’s murder.

Alex Da Corte's "Lightning" (Photo/Hannah Breisinger)

A room branched off from this installation displays Joseph Beuy’s sculpture "Lightning with Stag in its Glare," which is manipulated by Da Corte using green lights, carpet, the scent of mint and cedar, and soft, eerie music — giving the sculpture, which has been displayed at the museum for a decade, an entirely new feel and mood. This particular room was another one I could have stayed in for another hour, and I found myself laying on the carpet and closing my eyes for ten minutes or so, before realizing I was supposed to have met up with the rest of my group twenty minutes ago and that they were probably all looking for me (they were).

Alex Da Corte and Joseph Beuy's "Lightning with Stag in its Glare" (Photo/Hannah Breisinger)

Da Corte uses items and objects that we consume and are surrounded by daily, and are generally comfortable and familiar with, to create an uncomfortable, unfamiliar world that can bring feelings of wonder, confusion, or discomfort to the viewer. He arranges these objects in a manner to reflect his own experiences or mock the world that so many Americans find themselves living in. He uses manipulation to create beauty and bewilderment.

The idea of taking ordinary objects or ordinary, domestic interior spaces, such as a soda can, a broken television, or a kitchen table, and manipulating them in some way to create a space that is no longer familiar to us is paradoxical and eye-opening. The way so many Americans live — in their familiar homes surrounded by the items they consume and survive off of — is comfortable, but what happens when that comfort is taken away? Or even better — what happens when that comfort is distorted by the very items we know and are familiar with, such as the ending shot for Looney Tunes, or a box of tissues? What happens when we see these items being used in unconventional ways?

I left the exhibit with squinted eyes from the dim lighting and a strong sense of introspection. Da Corte’s work explores so many elements of life that we try to shy away from, but are necessary to experience. We need unfamiliarity and discomfort, just like we need to dream each night in order to organize our experiences and thought processes. Sometimes, we just need to lay down in an unfamiliar room in an unfamiliar museum in an unfamiliar town, and just daydream.

For more information on MASS MoCA and Da Corte’s work, visit the MASS MoCA website here.