Elizabeth Dee is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Alex Bag in the gallery at 545 West 20th Street.  The gallery will be open as the work is installed beginning Saturday, February 21.  There will be an opening reception for the artist on Saturday, February 28, from 6 to 8 pm.

Alex Bag’s new exhibition features drawings, a video installation, and proposed ad campaigns authored by a uniquely innovative new company headquartered in the gallery.  Part think tank, part P.R. firm, part corporate image consultant, and part advertising agency, Coven Services for Consumer Mesmerism, Product Sorcery, and the Necromantic Reimagination of Consumption embraces a grimly evolved style of capitalism that views consumers as pawns whose weaknesses are seized upon and encouraged.  The company’s clients are some of the world’s largest, most powerful, most sinister multinational corporations.  As the name suggests, Coven Services employs witchcraft and mystical traditions in addition to standard advertising language and methods in generating print ads, television commercials, and corporate damage control for its clients.

The gallery will be transformed into Coven Services’ office, studio, and company screening room.  While recognizably an office with reception area, comfortable seating, and carpet, the company’s connection to the occult is evinced by demon animal familiars on the walls and other decorative choices.

The company shares the germination of ad campaign ideas with visitors to the office by displaying a series of collages incorporating drawing, Polaroids, storyboards, scripts, ad copy, and spells specific to the campaign.  The ideas on display in these campaign proposal collages can be found in their finished versions in the print ads present, or in commercials in the video installation.

Finely executed pencil drawings comprise the finished ads, allegorizing figures from contemporary American culture: a naked Michael Jackson transfixed by a pair of enormous serpents intertwined in the double helix of DNA, for example, or Rush Limbaugh as Baphomet, winged, horned, and inscribed in an inverted pentagram surrounded by a nimbus of Oxycontin.  Bag’s new video manipulates found footage (a hotel heiress’ maiden voyage into amateur porn) intercut with Coven Services commercials.

Alex Bag was born in New York in 1969.  Performance, video, acting, drawing, and installation have long been central to her work, which is concerned with the particular ills and alienation of late capitalism, and combines humor, acerbic wit, politics, and feminism.  This is the artist's fourth solo show in New York.  In April she will screen her work and speak at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

The artist’s previous video work will be available for viewing by appointment at the gallery for the duration of the exhibition.  On Saturday, March 13, from 6 to 9 pm, the gallery will host "An Evening with Alex Bag," during which she and other New York artists and friends will vj a range of favorite videos

• 2004
• Smith, Roberta. "Alex Bag," New York Times