Alex Yudzon: A Room for the Night

Alex Yudzon (b. 1977) began photographing in hotel rooms in 2014, when a trip abroad found him stranded in a foreign city with an abundance of free time and a dearth of creative outlets. He began assembling the furniture in his room into a series of installations, photographing as he went along. Since then, his fascination with the hotel room as both a laboratory for creativity and a zone of transgression has only intensified. In the intervening years he has developed a stringent approach to making the work: he uses only the furniture found in the rooms he occupies; he works in secret; he works alone. Using this approach, Yudzon stacks, leans, and balances furniture in configurations that transform these generic interiors into hallucinatory worlds where the laws of physics are suspended and dormant emotions released. After the installations are documented, they are dismantled and the rooms returned to their original condition. The resulting photographs, shot in a style reminiscent of crime scene photography, remain the only existing evidence of what transpires during his stay. Initially conceived as a series of journeys, A Room for the Night focuses exclusively on American hotels. The aim of this book is not to present a comprehensive overview of hotels in America. Rather, the images and text contemplate our uneasy relationship to the hotel as a liminal space operating beyond the codes and conventions that govern the outside world. Combining dark humor, loneliness and creative obsession, this work tells the story of not just the installations, but of the hotels themselves, the people that own and operate them, the communities in which they're based, and the journey through which they are connected.

Alex Yudzon is a New York-based visual artist whose work blurs the line between photography, painting, sculpture and performance. Creating autonomous photographs from site specific installations and studio based still lifes, Yudzon’s work draws attention to the way we construct personal space within the context of the modern world. Yudzon’s work has been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally, including Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, China International Photography Biennial and the Arles Photo Festival. Yudzon was an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in the fall of 2017. In 2018, he had a solo show with Slag Gallery in Brooklyn and a two-person show at Rick Wester Fine Art in New York. In 2019, Yudzon was awarded a NYFA grant for photography, and his work was included in Contemporary Performance, a museum wide exhibition at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts.