Lisa Cooley is pleased to present Alex Fleming’s first solo exhibition, from March 1 until April 12, 2009. The exhibition opens with a reception for the artist on Sunday, March 1 from 6 until 8 pm.

Alex Fleming’s work uses a demure, elusive language comprised of reflections, double meanings and associative layering to focus attention on the perceptual and cognitive experience of the viewer. This exhibition of mirrored alphabet stickers on newsprint, layered video projections and sculpture use simple, austere means to conjure maximum meaning with minimal gesture. However, despite their apparent simplicity and ephemerality, these works evoke complex undertones of concealment and secrets.

In Rose, don’t touch anything, the silvered letters A, R, O, W, S fill the center and each corner of a sheet of newsprint, inviting the reader to play with the letters, their sounds and their combinations, piecing them together to create new meanings and associations ? a rose, eros, arrows. Inspired by the poems of Stephané Mallarmé, and the word-events of George Brecht, these works are animated and transformed through the viewer’s performative act.

The lace curtains of his apartment consists of a projected sequence of slowly turning blank pages, taken from the opening sequence of Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie, his 1964 expressionist thriller about a beautiful kleptomaniac. The turning pages overlap a staccato slide projection – nuanced portraits of a mysterious female character interrupted by bold, fragmented images. Against this montage, a discordant, and relentless soundtrack repeats itself.

Several works touch on themes of reflective contemplation, while others play with theatrical, flamboyant affectations. The interplay between private exploration and public exposure articulated throughout the exhibition is akin to Fleming’s process of filtering his analytic inspirations Fluxus approaches to artmaking, structural film and experimental poetry, through a personal exploration of identity, beauty, sexuality and coded communication.

Alex Fleming lives and works in New York City. He was born in 1984 and received his BA in Art History from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He is the art editor of the critical journal, Farimani, and previously organized a series of performances at the gallery in September 2008.