Alex McQuilkin

Alex McQuilkin (1980, Boston) combines psychoanalysis, maudlin sentimentality, dark humor, and deep sincerity in her videos, drawings, objects, and installations, through which she explores the construction of female identity in Western culture. She describes her work as “walking a really fine line, investigating the stereotyping and damning of women not directly through a male view, but as that view has been carefully woven into the social structure and internalized in women.” Best known for her videos, in which she plays the starring role, she mines teenage and Hollywood culture to reveal the destructive effects of this stereotyping. In Fucked (2000), her breakout piece, McQuilkin presents a sex-tape, of a sort. Her face tightly framed by the camera, she applies make-up while in the midst of the experience described by the video’s title, so hyper-focused on her image that she cannot let go.