Alex Da Corte's mid-career survey, "The Whale," is on view at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, featuring works that repurpose pop-cultural icons like Disney villains and Mariah Carey to explore themes of erasure and violence. The exhibition includes pieces such as *A Time to Kill* (2016), which obliquely references the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting through an inverted Elsa standee, and *The Great Pretender* (2021), which removes Lily Tomlin from a TIME magazine cover to comment on queer erasure.
The exhibition matters because it reframes Da Corte's practice as a sustained critique of how corporations and media obscure marginalized identities beneath cheerful surfaces. The review argues that Da Corte's work is not merely campy or superficial, but a deliberate strategy to make visible what is omitted—queer histories, trauma, and violence—challenging viewers to look beyond pop culture's glossy facade. This show solidifies Da Corte's relevance in contemporary art discourse around representation and institutional critique.