NEW YORK, NY.- Artist Leah Schrager announced her exhibition entitled Unprotected Specs, on view at the Montauk Beach House from July 5. Her exhibition will include 11 visual works and her first in-person (IRL) performance entitled Angles on a Woman. Schrager’s art uses the base image of herself which she digitally alters, enhances, and/or censors. The results are printed on photographic paper or aluminum. There will also be a discussion with the artist on July 7th at noon at the Montauk Beach House.
Schrager’s performance Angles on a Woman is a reflection of her process and an investigation of Jacques Derrida’s “Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography,” in which he states that photography is “as much production as recording of images, as much act as gaze, as much performative event as passive archivization.” To create her pieces, Schrager travels to hotels or home shares like Airbnb and photographs herself by performing for the camera. She then processes the images through selection, touchup, and digital painting. Finally, she posts the images on various social media platforms.
In her live performance, viewers will see her production process in its three stages: Act I – Photoshoot; Act II – Processing; Act III – Posting. Schrager will be wearing the same costume in one setting but will embody three different kinds of women using different camera angles, physical poses, and capture moments. As part of Act III Schrager will post her selections to three different Instagram accounts, one of which is a “finsta” celebrity called @OnaArtist that she created in her own image and which currently has 3 million Instagram followers.
Not Your Mother’s Porn (Time’s Up) (2019) is a visual work consisting of a base photograph and an overlay of a secondary image through which the base photograph is censored. In the base photograph, Schrager is performing as Ona who is seated nude on a bed in an Airbnb with her legs open and in the act of pulling down her panties.
The secondary overlay is a stock image of a cartoon-like illustration of a woman holding an alarm clock. The woman is disneyfied to look like a proper princess-like good girl. She has an expression of surprise on her face. Both the woman’s head and the alarm clock are strategically positioned to censor Ona’s nudity.
Schrager’s practice is situated in a contemporary hotbed of female (in)appropriateness, censorship, celebrity/fandom, and personal branding that seeks to explore female biography and labor in today’s global society. Living and working in Brooklyn, NY, she received her MFA in Fine Art from Parsons in 2015. She has exhibited at the Museum of Visual Art in Leipzig, the Geothe-Institut in Baku, Johannes Vogt Gallery, Untitled Space, and Roman Fine Art, among others. She has been featured in Artforum, Monopol, Forbes, Time, Glamour, Artinfo, Elephant, Dazed & Confused, Vice, Playboy, Huffington Post, Viceland, NY Magazine, among others.
