The Evolution Of Despair Project By Romeo Doron Alaeff

Romeo Doron Alaeff was born in Brooklyn, New York. After initially studying Biomedical engineering, Mathematics and Photography, he received his BA from Tulane University in New Orleans in 1993 and his Master of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1996. His grandparents on his father's side were of Polish and Lithuanian descent and lived in Danzig, Germany (now Poland). His grandparents on his mother's side were from Yemen, from a small community that emigrated to Palestine in the 1930s. Romeo Alaeff lives and works in New York City.
Art
Romeo Alaeff's work "blurs the boundaries between icon and art, funny and serious, traditional and experimental, public and private." His projects "explore the experience of inhabiting liminal zones, those architectural spaces, psychological and physical states in which contradictions collide. In these unlikely spaces and fleeting situations, dissonant perspectives, beliefs, emotions, sounds and rhythms briefly coexist...For Alaeff, such unsettling 'in-between' states, where synthesis and separation are only infinitesimally differentiated, contain the potential for both terror and beauty. In practices that include documentary, video, film, installation, photography, drawing and music, Alaeff pirouettes on the thin line between fusion and confusion, gently pulling at the seams that hold the fictional fabric of reality in check." (From "Mobilizing Difference" by Nuit Banai)" Alaeff often approaches his work with a sardonic or dark sense of humor such as in his project The Evolution of Despair which consists of a series of detailed drawings of animals with quintessentially human thoughts and emotions. His book, "I'll be dead by the time you read this: The Existential Life of Animals" (Plume (publisher)/Penguin Group, 2011) (Nov. 29, 2011) is a continuation of this body of work. A sticker campaign was also launched from the original Evolution of Despair drawings and is featured in the book and exhibition tour , "Stuck-up Piece of Crap: Stickers: From Punk Rock to Contemporary Art" (Rizzoli, RCS MediaGroup, 2010), a Street art/Sticker art bible which covers the history of the medium from Andy Warhol to Banksy. His series "Life is Not Funny" also uses similar humor, taking jabs at beliefs and societal norms. His now 16 year documentary film series, "There's No Place Like You" (formerly "Still Life with You") is a tragi-comic series of "short stories" "devoted to his idiosyncratic, exuberantly complicated relatives." Some of Alaeff's work doesn't employ humor directly but is still trained on social, psychological or philosophical observations, such as bias in perception in his "War on the Brain" series, choice in "The Tyranny of Small Decisions," or in "Crybaby," the act of crying as a manipulative device in human discourse as well as in filmmaking. In this project, Alaeff asked different musicians such as Chi2 (band) Strings and Moby to score the same 4 min. video of a young girl crying which was then played in a loop such that each viewer had a different experience of the piece such as "pathos, anxiety, pity and, in our attempt to give meaning to such seemingly unmediated emotion, an imagined internal narrative of heartbreak at the end of summer or an accident on the highway. As a whole Alaeff's work is meant to be interactive, speaking directly or indirectly to the viewer or allowing one's biases and projections to become part of the work.