Desiree D'Alessandro
Brief Artist's Statement:
Art is the arena in which I fight to better understand the world. Through sweat and sacrifice, I am conditioned to transform work into a physical and intellectual encounter. My interactive works revolve around kinaesthetic examinations via a variety of platforms. I train in site-specific, installation, digital, and performative modes of production. During these investigative bouts, my aim is to provoke discourse on subjects that are on-target and immediate. I seek to encourage and enhance the experience of spectator involvement. Therefore my practice eliminates the ropes that restrict the ring, so that the scale of the encounter can shift from the individual to the social. By intersecting Art and Athleticism, I openly challenge spectators from different arenas to converge and converse. My involvement with Amateur Boxing and its rigorous training parallels my artistic practice. Through both, I attempt to harness my bodily intent within the work. Whether as a physical work out, a contest, a spectacle, or the opportunity for visual and cognitive mapping, my work is ideological and intellectual. The outcome is also affectively visceral––showcasing image, scale, movement, color, time, and space. Throughout struggles to understand ourselves in relation to the world, there is no ringside. We are all in this fight.
Brawling Runs in the Blood
1991, 2010
Digital Photograph
9" x 12"
Public Endurance Training
Feb. 2011
4-hour training session for UCSB MFA Open Studios
in collaboration with Hall of Fame boxing historian David Martinez supervising
Harder Stadium, Santa Barbara, Ca
Art in Athleticism: The Form and Physicality of Boxing
MFA Thesis Exhibition and Bout
April. 2011
University of California - Santa Barbara
Old Gym Gallery 479,
Santa Barbara, Ca
"Float Like a Butterfly"
2011
Boxing Artifacts
Dimensions Vary
A Boxer's Soundscape:
The Battle During and Between Rounds
2011
Immersive Audio Installation, Synchronized Boxing Interval Timer
Three 2-Minute rounds, 1-Minute Intervals; Infinite Loop
Jennifer Vanderpool, Ph.D.
May 2011
Los Angeles, California
Desiree D'Alessandro is an artist and a boxer. She employs her body as the framing device for her creative practice and in this way, her work slips between performative art and working out at the gym. D’Alessandro documents her workouts and getting in shape to compete in upcoming amateur boxing fights and then uploads the videos on YouTube. She records the process of sculpting her body into that of a competitive athlete. D’Alessandro’s cataloging her progress is in the tradition of Eleanor Antin’s 1972 work “Carving: A Traditional Sculpture.” Antin photographed herself everyday from four angles over a period of 37 days to record her ten pound weight loss. She displayed her photographic documentation in a grid that mimicked a scientific table, thereby removing an emotional response to the work. Antin’s piece is an icon of the Seventies Feminist Art Movement in which women artists created works that in general questioned the male gaze, social definitions of beauty, and their role in the art world. Isn’t D’Alessandro’s work asking similar sorts of queries…. What is the role of feminism in contemporary art practices? What is the role of women athletes in today’s society? What opportunities are available for these women to compete at elite levels and as professionals?
D’Alessandro’s YouTube videos have garnered a following of family, friends, and random people turned fans that check-in regularly to see her progress and cheer her on with their comments. The reception to D’Alessandro’s videos on YouTube contributes to the contemporary public discourse of “you go girl!” encouragement which then becomes self-affirmation for her rigorous workouts. D’Alessandro employs YouTube as a social networking site to share her videos and engage in mediated conversations, but also as an artistic tool much like Antin chose photographs and not video as a creative medium for her work. In a recent student exhibition, D’Alessandro complemented her YouTube videos with portraits of herself and her boxing friends. She collaborated with photographer Raymond Douglas to take these photographs. The resulting images are idealized pictures of amateur boxers wearing workout clothes, arms up with gloves on, and intense expressions on their faces. Their ambition is palpable.
In addition to the photographs, D’Alessandro built a scale model of a boxing ring on an elevated platform in the gallery. The ring included nylon covered ropes and corner guards. The comparatively diminutive scale of the ring objectified it and consequently it functioned as a stage and another narrative element in D’Alessandro’s project. It is easy to image the photographed boxers fighting in the ring. Yet, it is not necessary to image them fighting as viewers could attend the exhibition bout that D’Alessandro scheduled at the closing reception. The bout was real: D’Alessandro believes spectators metaphorically felt each boxer’s punch land on his opponent. Boxing is D’Alessandro’s passion and it is the underlying personal narrative that informs her studio practice. Her body as an art object is the continuity between herself as self and herself as performer. As a performer, D’Alessandro’s work questions the mediated construction of achieving an ideal athletic body, the dreams of an aspiring athlete, and perhaps most importantly the role of contemporary women artists who in-turn are also athletes.
Maggie Knapp, BA Historian
May 2011
Santa Barbara, California
With her work originating from an artistic investment in relational aesthetics, Desiree D’Alessandro began as a MFA student a parallel personal odyssey to improve her health and in so doing stumbled upon a community in the rival direction of art: athletics. Her boxing bouts draw a crowd of exemplary diversity—from frat boys to academics—that becomes engrossed not only in the spectacle but just as emphatically in the relations that interlace them. Sports offer an investment that is immediate, unbridled, and not only reflective but constitutive of our characters. In the ring, D’Alessandro fights a personal battle with universal resonance. Though each bout is a performative piece, it is unscripted and the outcome unpredictable, and it is through this process of risk and ritual that this guerrilla girl sows her art. Her audience can identify from a feminist stance, an artistic perspective, and an athletic enthusiasm with a transformational quest that inspires and unites us. D’Alessandro is both artist and advocate at once, shedding her own blood and tears for her art, sacrificing herself not as a martyr but as something much more active and empowered. The crowd that she draws is not self-selecting, as is lamentably so often the case with collaborative works. Instead, D’Alessandro’s audience represents the more collective republic of the public, whose interaction becomes instinctual rather than intellectual.
What began organically as an act of recreation and self-enrichment became an obsession for formal mastery that echoes all the familiar tropes of hero narrative. D’Alessandro’s boxing truly pushes the boundaries of art as open-ended medium; it is conceptual to the point of eliminating the medium of its transmission, leaving raw libidinal response in its wake. D’Alessandro’s practice has been challenged conceptually, but her unapologetic and relentless progress has proven her work to be that of the intractable avant-garde. What drives her is not external pressure but internal resolve, a tempestuous cotillion of rationality and sensuality both in the ring and in the studio. D’Alessandro’s performance foregrounds a pregnant moment that fills the air with baited breath—all the energy and expectation suppressed by the space of the museum-temple. D’Alessandro has reactivated artistic spectatorship in a way that integrates the audience into the performance and as not crowd but community, relating on innumerable levels to the sacred ceremony of blood sport. There is fracturing, there is nostalgia, there is myth and narrative, personal trial and triumph all wrestling for attention. While D’Alessandro faces down her ‘perfect other’ in an opponent comparable in weight class and experience, her performance brings together a community of others. In this ring, combative sport serves to integrate diverse demographics; perhaps the medium is negligible, but there is something sweetly ironic in the use of a brawl to fuse solidarity. Aesthetic cues delineate the ancient space of ritual: red and blue gloves mirror the red and blue perimeter ropes of the ring. Sacrament prepares D’Alessandro for the bout: ceremonial hand wrapping, headgear fastening, and the insertion of a mouth guard. A brutal beauty unfolds in this dance. D’Alessandro’s inspired practice of sport-turned-art breathes new life into boxing as both sweet science and noble art.
Brief Artist's Statement:
Art is the arena in which I fight to better understand the world. Through sweat and sacrifice, I am conditioned to transform work into a physical and intellectual encounter. My interactive works revolve around kinaesthetic examinations via a variety of platforms. I train in site-specific, installation, digital, and performative modes of production. During these investigative bouts, my aim is to provoke discourse on subjects that are on-target and immediate. I seek to encourage and enhance the experience of spectator involvement. Therefore my practice eliminates the ropes that restrict the ring, so that the scale of the encounter can shift from the individual to the social. By intersecting Art and Athleticism, I openly challenge spectators from different arenas to converge and converse. My involvement with Amateur Boxing and its rigorous training parallels my artistic practice. Through both, I attempt to harness my bodily intent within the work. Whether as a physical work out, a contest, a spectacle, or the opportunity for visual and cognitive mapping, my work is ideological and intellectual. The outcome is also affectively visceral––showcasing image, scale, movement, color, time, and space. Throughout struggles to understand ourselves in relation to the world, there is no ringside. We are all in this fight.
Brawling Runs in the Blood
1991, 2010
Digital Photograph
9" x 12"
"Shoulders Like Boulders"
2010
Full-Color Vinyl Banner
3' x 6'
2010
Full-Color Vinyl Banner
3' x 6'
Public Endurance Training
Feb. 2011
4-hour training session for UCSB MFA Open Studios
in collaboration with Hall of Fame boxing historian David Martinez supervising
Harder Stadium, Santa Barbara, Ca
Art in Athleticism: The Form and Physicality of Boxing
MFA Thesis Exhibition and Bout
April. 2011
University of California - Santa Barbara
Old Gym Gallery 479,
Santa Barbara, Ca
"Float Like a Butterfly"
2011
Boxing Artifacts
Dimensions Vary
A Boxer's Soundscape:
The Battle During and Between Rounds
2011
Immersive Audio Installation, Synchronized Boxing Interval Timer
Three 2-Minute rounds, 1-Minute Intervals; Infinite Loop
May 2011
Los Angeles, California
Desiree D'Alessandro is an artist and a boxer. She employs her body as the framing device for her creative practice and in this way, her work slips between performative art and working out at the gym. D’Alessandro documents her workouts and getting in shape to compete in upcoming amateur boxing fights and then uploads the videos on YouTube. She records the process of sculpting her body into that of a competitive athlete. D’Alessandro’s cataloging her progress is in the tradition of Eleanor Antin’s 1972 work “Carving: A Traditional Sculpture.” Antin photographed herself everyday from four angles over a period of 37 days to record her ten pound weight loss. She displayed her photographic documentation in a grid that mimicked a scientific table, thereby removing an emotional response to the work. Antin’s piece is an icon of the Seventies Feminist Art Movement in which women artists created works that in general questioned the male gaze, social definitions of beauty, and their role in the art world. Isn’t D’Alessandro’s work asking similar sorts of queries…. What is the role of feminism in contemporary art practices? What is the role of women athletes in today’s society? What opportunities are available for these women to compete at elite levels and as professionals?
D’Alessandro’s YouTube videos have garnered a following of family, friends, and random people turned fans that check-in regularly to see her progress and cheer her on with their comments. The reception to D’Alessandro’s videos on YouTube contributes to the contemporary public discourse of “you go girl!” encouragement which then becomes self-affirmation for her rigorous workouts. D’Alessandro employs YouTube as a social networking site to share her videos and engage in mediated conversations, but also as an artistic tool much like Antin chose photographs and not video as a creative medium for her work. In a recent student exhibition, D’Alessandro complemented her YouTube videos with portraits of herself and her boxing friends. She collaborated with photographer Raymond Douglas to take these photographs. The resulting images are idealized pictures of amateur boxers wearing workout clothes, arms up with gloves on, and intense expressions on their faces. Their ambition is palpable.
In addition to the photographs, D’Alessandro built a scale model of a boxing ring on an elevated platform in the gallery. The ring included nylon covered ropes and corner guards. The comparatively diminutive scale of the ring objectified it and consequently it functioned as a stage and another narrative element in D’Alessandro’s project. It is easy to image the photographed boxers fighting in the ring. Yet, it is not necessary to image them fighting as viewers could attend the exhibition bout that D’Alessandro scheduled at the closing reception. The bout was real: D’Alessandro believes spectators metaphorically felt each boxer’s punch land on his opponent. Boxing is D’Alessandro’s passion and it is the underlying personal narrative that informs her studio practice. Her body as an art object is the continuity between herself as self and herself as performer. As a performer, D’Alessandro’s work questions the mediated construction of achieving an ideal athletic body, the dreams of an aspiring athlete, and perhaps most importantly the role of contemporary women artists who in-turn are also athletes.
Maggie Knapp, BA Historian
May 2011
Santa Barbara, California
With her work originating from an artistic investment in relational aesthetics, Desiree D’Alessandro began as a MFA student a parallel personal odyssey to improve her health and in so doing stumbled upon a community in the rival direction of art: athletics. Her boxing bouts draw a crowd of exemplary diversity—from frat boys to academics—that becomes engrossed not only in the spectacle but just as emphatically in the relations that interlace them. Sports offer an investment that is immediate, unbridled, and not only reflective but constitutive of our characters. In the ring, D’Alessandro fights a personal battle with universal resonance. Though each bout is a performative piece, it is unscripted and the outcome unpredictable, and it is through this process of risk and ritual that this guerrilla girl sows her art. Her audience can identify from a feminist stance, an artistic perspective, and an athletic enthusiasm with a transformational quest that inspires and unites us. D’Alessandro is both artist and advocate at once, shedding her own blood and tears for her art, sacrificing herself not as a martyr but as something much more active and empowered. The crowd that she draws is not self-selecting, as is lamentably so often the case with collaborative works. Instead, D’Alessandro’s audience represents the more collective republic of the public, whose interaction becomes instinctual rather than intellectual.
What began organically as an act of recreation and self-enrichment became an obsession for formal mastery that echoes all the familiar tropes of hero narrative. D’Alessandro’s boxing truly pushes the boundaries of art as open-ended medium; it is conceptual to the point of eliminating the medium of its transmission, leaving raw libidinal response in its wake. D’Alessandro’s practice has been challenged conceptually, but her unapologetic and relentless progress has proven her work to be that of the intractable avant-garde. What drives her is not external pressure but internal resolve, a tempestuous cotillion of rationality and sensuality both in the ring and in the studio. D’Alessandro’s performance foregrounds a pregnant moment that fills the air with baited breath—all the energy and expectation suppressed by the space of the museum-temple. D’Alessandro has reactivated artistic spectatorship in a way that integrates the audience into the performance and as not crowd but community, relating on innumerable levels to the sacred ceremony of blood sport. There is fracturing, there is nostalgia, there is myth and narrative, personal trial and triumph all wrestling for attention. While D’Alessandro faces down her ‘perfect other’ in an opponent comparable in weight class and experience, her performance brings together a community of others. In this ring, combative sport serves to integrate diverse demographics; perhaps the medium is negligible, but there is something sweetly ironic in the use of a brawl to fuse solidarity. Aesthetic cues delineate the ancient space of ritual: red and blue gloves mirror the red and blue perimeter ropes of the ring. Sacrament prepares D’Alessandro for the bout: ceremonial hand wrapping, headgear fastening, and the insertion of a mouth guard. A brutal beauty unfolds in this dance. D’Alessandro’s inspired practice of sport-turned-art breathes new life into boxing as both sweet science and noble art.
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