CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- The MIT List Visual Arts Center premieres a film and suite of drawings by New York-based artist Andrea Crespo as part of its ongoing List Projects exhibition series. The hour-long, animated film [intensifies] (2016) narrates the atypical development of Alan, a fictional young autistic male, from the first-person perspective. Alan is subjected to a range of psychological tests and daily trials, manifest in terms associated with terror and alienation. He follows the circulation of autism discourse, which proliferates across satirical internet memes, and is constructed in terms of crisis and epidemic in mainstream media. The film, inspired in part by the personal experiences of the artist, engages with autism as a simultaneously embodied and sociocultural entity.

The film is accompanied by a suite of 12 graphite drawings that depict Alan’s machinic fantasies and a neurodivergent experience of the world—often typecast as unfeeling and inhuman— expressed in images of transport, warfare, and terror. Although conceiving of himself as faulty hardware in need of repair, Alan finds solace among the machines applied as metaphors for the autistic body, which mediate a continuous dialogue between segregation, pathology, and the governance of care. Both the film and drawings engage with the theme of the changeling, a common motif in literature and film depicting the troubled adolescent, the demonic child, or the disturbed loner. The use of this trope increased markedly following the mainstreaming of autism discourse as well as the proliferation of school shootings in recent decades, remaining a normative archetype associated with neurological difference.

Andrea Crespo (b. 1993, Miami, lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) takes their own neurological embodiment as a point of inquiry as well as departure for a practice spanning video, drawing, and sculpture. Crespo connects their personal narratives to computational networking, posthumanism, and the medical sciences, as well as to institutional apparatuses of control and surveillance. Crespo’s solo exhibitions include the New Museum/Rhizome (online), New York; Swiss Institute / Contemporary Art, New York; Hester, New York; and KraupaTuskany Zeidler, Berlin. Their work has been presented in group exhibitions including: Dreamlands at the Whitney Museum of American Art; From Minimalism into Algorithm at The Kitchen; Looks at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; and Inhuman at the Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany. Their work is the subject of articles and essays in publications including Artforum, Art in America, Cura., Flash Art International, Kaleidoscope, Modern Painters, and Mousse.

List Projects: Andrea Crespo is curated by Alise Upitis, with Yuri Stone, MIT List Visual Arts Center