Alex Yudzon

BIO
Begun in 2014, A Room for the Night is an ongoing series of images made by Alex Yudzon entirely in hotel rooms. Traveling to different hotels around the world, he secretly makes and photographs temporary sculptural assemblages using only the furniture and objects found in each room.

As temporary homes, hotel rooms often attract unusual and even forbidden interaction. The work enacts these interactions using furniture as props. Working alone, he stacks, leans, and balances furniture in configurations that range from the formal to the surreal. These sculptural installations transform the occupied rooms into theaters of beauty and absurdity. Upturned stacks of dressers and nightstands become tribal totems. Mattresses are leaned against walls to reveal garish designs beneath the sheets. Chairs and side tables are balanced in juxtapositions evoking modernist sculpture, minimalist installations and bauhaus architecture. Once these sculptures are completed, they are photographed in the austere style of black and white crime scene photography and the room restored to its original condition.

The photographs combine a rigorous formal approach with humorous art historical references to examine our uneasy relationship to hotel rooms as centers of displacement and intrigue. By reimagining the hotel room as a stage upon which unconscious impulses are privately enacted, Yudzon’s work makes visible the hidden dreams, desires, transgressions and fantasies that all rooms secretly contain.

Yudzon has exhibited extensively in the U.S. and abroad, with recent solo and two-person exhibitions taking place at the Sirius Art Center (Cobh, Ireland), Rick Wester Fine Art (NY, NY), Slag Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), and Galerie Le Magasin de Jonets (Arles, France), among others. He has been awarded many artist in residence programs, including at Est Nord Est (Canada), The Church (Oneonta, NY), Headlands Center for the Arts (Marin County, CA), and Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT). In 2019, he was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Photography.