How Alex Yudzon Transformed a Brooklyn Hotel Room into a Temporary Sculpture Studio
(This is the story behind the photograph, a glimpse into the moment, the process, and the vision that brought it to life.)
His canvas was a Brooklyn hotel room. His brush: furniture.
In the spring of 2025, Alex Yudzon spent one month inside a single hotel room, turning it into something between a sculpture and a photograph. He moved furniture, adjusted shadows, and worked slowly, treating the room like a studio, not a place to sleep. This wasn’t a random hotel either. He and his wife had spent their wedding night there years before. That personal link made the project feel different from the start.
This was not how he usually works.
In most hotels, he has just two or three days to create something before checkout. But now he had time to refine the scene, fix angles, shift tension, and use every corner of the space. The result was one of the most detailed and carefully built photographs in his series A Room for the Night. It was made in private, destroyed in silence, and captured in a single frame.
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Alex Yudzon - Ace Hotel, Brooklyn, 2025
In the spring of 2025, Alex Yudzon did something he had never done before. For the first time, he stayed in one hotel room for a full month. It wasn’t in some far-off place, it was just a 30-minute walk from his home in Brooklyn. But this room held personal meaning: he and his wife had spent their wedding night here.
When the hotel announced an artist residency, Yudzon applied immediately. “I'm the perfect person to be in this residency because we spent our wedding night there and I make work about hotels and I live a 30 minute walk away and I have a toddler.”
The result was one of the most refined and constructed images in his series A Room for the Night. Normally, he only has a few days to create a photograph. This time, he had weeks. Weeks to move furniture, shape shadows, and build something strange.
"This picture is kind of unique because it's a result of something I've never done before... I was there for an entire month... it really gave me an opportunity to refine the installation."
The hotel’s palette helped shape the image. Brown plywood furniture. Green vinyl cushions. Beige fabric. Dark gray armchairs. That strict color range gave the photograph a surprising elegance. It also sparked memories.
"The constructivist quality of it made me think of Russian constructivism... Totland's monument for the Third International... everything is kind of also Totland's monument, sort of going sideways a little bit and everything's at an angle."
The sculptural pile of furniture was not random. It was carefully shaped, balanced over a week, then refined for another. Angles mattered. Tensions between objects mattered. As a former painter, Yudzon used every piece of visual space like a canvas.
"Composition has always been very important... the way your eye moves from line to shape to volume to negative space... all play a huge role in the construction of these works."
There’s also something theatrical in the scene. Behind the sculpture: a black curtain. Above it: a round ceiling lamp that glows like a moon.
"It had this orb-like light fixture... almost like a sun or a moon... and so building this sculpture next to that... having that sort of illuminate part of the sculpture, almost like it's an aspirational symbol... I think worked really well within what the space gave."
The photograph was shot using simple strobes. Yudzon avoids complex lighting setups. He doesn’t want the room to look like a fashion shoot.
"I don't want these things to have a vogue quality to them where everything is perfect... I want them to have a little bit of a grungy quality."
What you see in the photo no longer exists. The furniture was returned to its place. The sculpture was erased. But for Yudzon, that impermanence is part of the point.
"To me, the essential quality of the hotel is... the secrecy and the anonymity... I love the work to function within that, to be made, to be witnessed only by me, to then be captured and documented... and then returned to its original condition so that nobody is aware of what happened."
It’s a photograph that came from quiet labor and deep attention. And from following an impulse that didn’t seem important at first, but led somewhere unexpected.
"Just focus on things that you love to do, whatever they are, and be sensitive to where they lead you... if you do that and you're intuitive... wonderful things start to happen almost on their own."
