Alex Kerr: Starting Gate

NOON Projects is honored to present "Starting Gate" by Alex Kerr, opening April 4, 2025. This is Kerr’s first exhibition with NOON Projects in Los Angeles, following a solo presentation together at NADA Miami in 2023. "Starting Gate" showcases a new body of work that brings together ceramic lamp sculptures, bronze works, paintings, and a sound piece, extending Kerr’s exploration of desire, control, and deflection—the mechanisms by which we reveal, restrain, and obscure ourselves.

Kerr’s practice is rooted in dramaturgic symbolism and the shifting nature of identity, pulling from theatrical motifs, stagecraft, and surrealist humor. His work navigates the real and imagined space between authenticity and artifice, where performance becomes both a form of expression and a site of tension. "Starting Gate" builds upon this foundation, presenting a richly textured world where familiar objects are transformed and recontextualized. Through new material investigations, including cast bronze plates and large-scale ceramic lamps, Kerr deepens his inquiry into the paradox of self-mythology—where the compulsion to be seen collides with the instinct to withdraw.

Desire, control, and deflection underscore the exhibition’s central themes. The manic hunger of cartoonish longing—the awooga eyes, the slack-jawed wolf—is met with an equal and opposite force of restraint. In a new series of paintings built on mitered panels that appear to leap into space, Kerr renders an abstracted, backstage reality populated by the harlequin, the dressing room mirror, and warped theatrical planes—places of transformation where identity is both crafted and dissolved. His two monumental ceramic lamps—each standing nearly six feet tall—embody this theatrical tension. One lamp, a four-faced clock tower labeled with different salads (Caesar, Cobb, Niçoise, and Waldorf), plays on the idea of being “dressed up” for performance, a humorous nod to the expectations of presentation. The other, featuring an overturned limousine perched on raindrops, evokes the aftermath of a spectacle—desire met with its inevitable collapse.

Kerr’s bronze plates—displayed on infinitely rotating bases—extend this meditation on control and deflection. The spinning plates, an age-old metaphor for precarious balance, suggest both an act of mastery and the prescient threat of failure. Throughout "Starting Gate," Kerr repurposes objects and symbols from his ongoing codex—the harlequin, the snowman, the trophy, playing cards, and surrealist clocks—constructing a universe where time loops endlessly, control is illusory, and the line between audience and performer blurs. The exhibition’s sound piece, an invisible cuckoo clock that announces the time every quarter hour, introduces an unseen presence into the space, underscoring the tension between revelation and retreat.

Ultimately, "Starting Gate" meditates on the push and pull of desire and control, the absurdity of performance, and the necessity of deflection. Kerr’s meticulous craft, honed through his background in traditional pottery techniques, becomes a vehicle for illusion—a magic act that toggles between revelation and disguise. In this latest body of work, Kerr pushes his inquiry into the mechanics of spectacle and self-invention, inviting viewers to question where the act begins and whether it ever truly ends.