Alexa Nikol Curran

The Image Falls Apart

The first time I encountered Rogier van der Weyden’s The Descent from the Cross (ca. 1435) was on a projector screen in a small survey classroom at Bennington College. Perhaps the work of my life is to translate that fateful collision with the painting to image and text. In its miraculous rendering of the affective dimensions of each of its human figures, The Descent transcends its religious context, offering the viewer an alternate way to access the image by thinking and feeling through the body.

“The Image Falls Apart” is a two-channel projected video installation that begins with a reduced tableau vivant of The Descent from the Cross. Utilizing two movement scores (one for each channel), an ensemble of six dancers oscillate through ten figural shapes from the painting, relying on this vocabulary during frameworks of improvisation. Channel 1 (left) prompts the ensemble to disintegrate, cycle, and pull the image apart, stretching it forward and backward through space. In Channel 2 (right), the ensemble assembles as a mirror image of Channel 1, adhering to a more restrained structure, replacing and removing bodies from the starting tableau until the entire group has exited the frame. New pathways for meaning arise as the ensemble replicates, destroys, and transforms the painting's logic. The Image Falls Apart engages The Descent’s multivalent interpretative potential not only as a form of visual exegesis, but also as a container for embodied research and representational intervention.

The Image Falls Apart
2026
video stills, two-channel projected video, no sound, 16 minutes 14 seconds

The Image Falls Apart
2026
Left channel video still, two-channel projected video, no sound, 16 minutes 14 seconds

The Image Falls Apart
2026
Right channel video still, two-channel projected video, no sound, 16 minutes 14 seconds