VONFURSTIMPRESSIONS Series 1999-2000. Alex with Esther Canadas, June 13, 2000. American Fashion Awards, Lincoln Center.
As an immersive work of interventionist performance art, I went undercover for one year at night posing as famed fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg's son, Alex. Using the name and a cheap vintage $20 suit "Alex" infiltrated hundreds of high profile celebrity parties in NYC in 1999 and 2000, meeting scores of luminaries such as PDiddy, Ivana Trump and even the President at the time, Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton. The whereabouts of the celebs were gleaned from public information; the Gossip pages of The New York Post and the Daily News. Sixty photographs make up the limited edition VONFURSTIMPRESSIONS Photo collection. All the photos were taken by handing a 35mm point and shoot camera to strangers in the vicinity, an homage to Duchamp’s ideas of chance operations.
The performance became a national scandal in the media and was featured on Television, ABC’s 20/20, on the front page of The New York Observer and in tabloids such as The Globe, to name a few. It was my first New York solo show at Roebling Hall gallery In Williamsburg, Brooklyn in October of 2000. Alex represents the birth of my Fantastic Nobody art form, which means fake person, who is a shapeshifter in an increasingly simulated reality.
