Alex Pensato

Alexei-Alex-Axel

2010

– @keywords

Alexei-Alex-Axel was a performance piece enacted on July 15, 2010 as part of the Not Sent Letters art event at the Biltmore Cabaret in Vancouver. Situated in the audience peripherally to the center stage, the artist employed method acting throughout the evening flickering between Alexei Ivanovich from Dostoyevski's novel The Gambler (1867), the artist himself, and Axel Freed (played by James Caan) from the movie The Gambler (1974). Dislodged in time and place, switching from character to character interpretation, Pensato attempted to continuously slip between identities, time periods, locations, and socio-political situations to create a disjointed memory time loop that encouraged ambient correlative associations.