“I’m always drawn to defend anything that people shit on aesthetically.” It’s hard to sum up an artist’s work in a single sentence, but for Alex Temple, that’s not a bad place to start. She has a particular interest in “reclaiming socially disapproved-of (‘cheesy’) sounds,” often taking and warping them into something more than a little disquieting. Her “Liebeslied” takes mid-20th century love songs at their word: What if you really did only notice the birds in the trees when your love was around, what if you really did only have eyes for them? Similarly, “Grass Stem Behaviors” builds an uncanny landscape from fragments of the traditional piano repertoire. Temple takes familiar references and assembles them into an unsettling phantasmagoria: the signs are all familiar, but they don’t point to anywhere you know.
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