by KLLR DNTST
In “Show World Order,” Valentina Vaccarella’s first solo exhibition, she seeks to create an environment of mannerist imagery that isolates, distorts, and exaggerates the voyeuristic elements of pornography. The floors are gray, the colors are mute, and the light seems sterile and rather stark -- like a doctor's waiting room.
The show features sculptures and ephemera: a bat bludgeoning out of a woman’s ass, serpentine bodies on a Freudian armchair, old books, jewelry, and receipts from her days moonlighting as a dancer at the famed Sapphire Club in New York City. Despite such cursory associations with sex work, Vaccarella insists the work isn’t concerned with that so much. Each piece sheds its association with sex work upon closer inspection, and instead imparts a sort of cold psychic energy about the female body. There is an uncanny quality to her sculptures, as if one has seen them in a nightmare.
The sculptures exist in a state of flux, between our psyche and the artifice of pornography. Vaccarella’s work generates an objective visual language beyond the typical discourse about sex workers. It's not a peep show. She depicts cut, disfigured bodies, and contorted limbs fixed on objects that elicit clinical and psychosexual references (e.g., transference between patient and therapist, violence, fighting, contact sports). For Vacarrella, these are women’s bodies in theatrical action, found in the interPENETRATION of art and pornography, rooted in our subconscious.
***
Valentina Vaccarella (American b.1993)
multidisciplinary
lives and works in Brooklyn, NY
For more visit:
@vlntnavaccarella
@other.subjects
*photos below by Kristine Eudey
