In my project epoch, stage, shell, I make black-and-white photographs in which I use my body as author and subject to perform sculptural poses for the camera. I am mimicking poses and gestures found in Greco-Roman ethnographic, art historical, and commercial images. In this work, I reconsider how women’s bodies have been historically presented and consumed. I cut up, layer, reconstruct and re-photograph these collaged compositions to strategically emphasize or disguise the evidence of my interventions, rendering the images as both whole and fragmented. The photographs complicate the legacy of the Western art historical canon, and they propose a messier standard of beauty: one that is mixed, eroded, and patched together.
In one photograph titled “Back in S-Curve with marble fragments (attributed to Praxiteles or Klein)”, a woman’s back is depicted from the torso up, body in S-curve, disjointed, and pieced back together. My visual inspiration for this photograph came from this Greco-Roman sculptural convention, as well as from 1990s Calvin Klein ads. This photograph, and others in this work, evokes how ancient material is seen—as partial and shattered— and alludes to the psychological violence caused by the idealization of women’s bodies both past and present.