Stripped

Media artist Laura Carton, based in New York, first became known for her project “Investor Relations,” an art-world intervention and a working investment club, exploring the clandestine pornography holdings of major United States corporations and the context within which political policies are formed her. The work in her current series “Stripped” is executed by downloading a variety of pornographic images from the Internet, removing the bodies and then digitally reconstructing the backgrounds from the existing evidence. In looking beyond the camouflage of naked flesh, what remain are carefully constructed and over-produced fictions; the mise-en-scènes of domestic space, suburban melodramas, utopian ideals and fantasies. Within the staged, mythic world of pornography, these newly constructed narratives offer a number of sites from which to question underlying assumptions about sexuality, class, race, desire and commodification. Stripped is printed in a first edition of 500 copies.

“What’s particularly alluring about these images is the way they implicate the viewer in the missing action . . . shorn of buffed, blow-dried actors, they lose their practical function and become open-ended. Your imagination does the rest.” — The New York Times