Romeo Doron Alaeff is an American visual artist, photographer, filmmaker, author and animation/film editor. He is also the founder and Editor in Chief of Lines & Marks, an interview magazine, blog and community dedicated to drawing.
Romeo Alaeff's art work has been described as "blur the boundaries between icon and art, funny and serious, traditional and experimental, public and private" and "explore the experience of inhabiting liminal zones, those architectural spaces, psychological and physical states in which contradictions collide." 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 expressing human thoughts and emotions. His book, I'll be Dead by the Time You Read This: The Existential Life of Animals is a continuation of that 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. Some of Alaeff's work doesn't employ humor directly but is trained on social, psychological or philosophical observations, such as bias in perception in his "socially and politically charged," "multicultural, complexly encoded" War on the Brain series, which consists of "gorgeously revamped Rorschach blots containing references to conflicts from William Wallace and All That to the Smell of Napalm in the morning in Vietnam." Other themes include choice as 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 Strings and Moby to score the same 4 minute 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. The documentary film series, "There's no place like you" is a collection of "short stories," begun in 1994 and spanning 16 years, which is devoted to his "idiosyncratic, exuberantly complicated relatives." The series "documents the harmony and discord that typifies family dynamics." Films in the series, "Believe," "Goin' Down to Mexico," "Works Like a Dream," "All is Vanity," and "Once."
