Gail Stoicheff
Aphrodisia, 2016

Stoicheff’s work speaks to the long human history of idolization and the impulses from which it springs.

With Aphrodisia, she turns her attention to the subject most traditionally and problematically idolized: the female figure. Casting a deliberately wide net from the earliest known work of art—the Venus of Willendorf, to the classic and contemporary, Stoicheff re-imagines the Venus as Chimera. Disregarding historical limitations of the trope, she allows her figures to take form by any means necessary. In one, the visage of a debaucherous Roman Caesar sits atop a massive Rorschach blot body; in another, a bull skull cast in Hydrocal is coupled with plaster claw feet and “self-portraits” of the artist’s own breasts.