Body / Body / Body

Offering an intimate counterpoint to an age of control, Jamie Isenstein, Fabienne Lasserre, and Sophy Naess reflect through the lenses of feminism, humor, and imagination to reclaim the body as a site of autonomy, performance, and pleasure.

Jamie Isenstein explores our collective bodily discomfort and the boundaries between object and subject, deploying her signature juxtapositions of humor and dread, phantasmagoria and banality. In her video Thingamajig, a dancer filmed in a funhouse mirror conjures a vaudevillian tango of disembodied limbs. Her photographic series, Body of Mirrors, employs similar analog techniques to abstract female bodies into surreal franken-forms. The exhibition also debuts new work from Isenstein’s ongoing Mood Clocks series, in which the clock’s hands are transformed into fragmented bodies that playfully keep time.

Fabienne Lasserre dissolves the body into abstraction in her work, continuing her feminist exploration of the body, vision, and touch. Pushing against modernist constraints, her hybrid painting-sculptures invent bodies. By contesting definitions of form—she considers her work “3-D paintings” or “2-D sculptures”—she draws analogies to contested definitions of gender and identity. Several new pieces from her decade-long Pitchables series will be shown alongside larger scale work, inviting viewers to experience the physical intimacy of moving around and through her work.

Sophy Naess re-imagines the bather motif—long filtered through the male gaze—within a baroque New Jersey Korean spa in her monumental The Bathers at Palisades Park (King Spa). Hyper-saturated red carpets, a trio of gold elephants, and an array of nude women (including Naess and a friend) fill this 15-by-9 foot mural on silk. Merging art history with everyday ritual, Naess presents a vivid, feminist tableau where leisure, labor, and art intersect. With a title that nods to Seurat, Naess folds in art historical bathing figures—ranging from Cézanne, Picasso, and Bonnard to Kiyonaga and ancient Chinese painting—inviting the viewer to reconsider the tradition of capturing the female form.

Refusing slick production values, each artist surprises with her material choices. Naess draws upon a decade of producing her Supporters Circle scarves, using a mylar stencil pochoir technique with echoes of Matisse. Lasserre combines painting, sculpture, reclaimed wood, vinyl, metal, and fabric remnants donated by clothing designers to create playful forms from cast-offs. Isenstein employs funhouse mirrors and pre-AI video effects to stage analog illusions, turning an old-fashioned mode of entertainment into a lens for imagining unbridled bodily autonomy. Her lo-fi painted clocks offer a wink to the uncanny.

Together, their work reflects the contradictions of inhabiting bodies in a fraught age, drawing viewers into the pleasures and perils and imperfect realities of human experience.

Jamie Isenstein

Friday Arts

Thingamajig and Body of Mirrors were made in the year Trump first took office, after defeating Hillary Clinton. Were you thinking about the charged gender politics of that election?

Jamie Isenstein

My work has always grappled with political questions, especially work that uses disembodied body parts. When I use my own body, or now other people’s—sometimes it's a hand or feet or a leg—there's this question of subject and object. Am I the subject or have I become an object? There are questions of power. Am I going to be the object and be the thing that power is acted upon, or am I making an object into a subject that has some sort of agency?

When I made these works in 2017, we had spent the previous year watching this campaign, thinking we would have the first female president. And we knew the stakes—Trump was going to stack the Supreme Court and overturn Roe v. Wade. So yes, I was thinking about the possibility of losing control over decisions about our own bodies. I wanted to stake a claim for people to be in charge of what happens to our own bodies—to stay subjects and not objects of other people's authority.

Humor is a recurrent theme in your work—there is always a wink to the audience in some way. Why?

I can't help it. I don't know why I always end up making work that seems silly or absurd at first but actually touches heavy topics. Sometimes when you talk about something heavy, like death or impermanence, it's too overwhelming. When it's too sincere, people don't take it seriously, because people don't want to be cornered into talking about heavy things. So the only real way to address hard topics for me is to do it in a funny way.

Some of your imagery evokes generative AI outputs, but you made these before that was possible and you remain committed to an analog practice.

I want to stay grounded in reality. Analog visual effects are still reality, as opposed to the digital world which is completely immaterial. For example, the hand-painted backgrounds of old movies like The Wizard of Oz. People know the characters are not in some sort of magical land, but we give ourselves permission to believe. There’s a suspension of disbelief. We are actually in control of the manipulation, we know we’re being deceived.

With the digital world we live in now, we're sophisticated, but not so sophisticated that we can always tell when something is real and when something isn't. I want to know when I’m being duped. So I like to use these old-fashioned techniques. I like the “grand illusions” used by magicians, that create magic tricks in a material, real-world way. Like the funhouse mirrors I used in making the video Thingamajig and the Body of Mirrors photographs.

What was it like to work with performers, as opposed to being the performer yourself?

Some of my performances and sculptures are limited to just me as the performer. For those works I use a “Will Return” sign for breaks but also because the sign focuses on the fact that one day I will not return. So these works are about my eventual death and that nothing lasts forever. I also liked the idea of tying the work to my own body because I could imagine myself growing old and seeing the work change as my body changed.

Thingamajig and Body of Mirrors are the first instances where I asked somebody else to do the performing for me. In the earlier works I didn’t want to ask someone to do something physically difficult for my art. But for these works I realized I could ask dancers to do the performing, something they actually wanted to do and then I could show off the magic of the human body moving beautifully. I could not do that myself.

In Mel Brooks’s movie Young Frankenstein, the doctor proves the monster is alive not just by moving, but by dancing to Putting on the Ritz. If I was going to use somebody to do a performance for me, I want them to "put on the ritz" and show what humans are capable of. The dancers, Elena Vazintaris in Thingamajig and Cat DeAngelis Olson in Body of Mirrors, really did that.

Fabienne Lasserre

Friday Arts

What is the origin of the Pitchables Series?

Fabienne Lasserre

I started this series because I wanted to make pieces that could be a little more intimate, that people could live with. No one I knew could fit my giant sculptures in their living space! When you’re used to working big, making things smaller can be challenging. I wasn't after a square flat piece on the wall. And so, they grew loops, some included vinyl, some got painted, some got layers of painted fabric. To me, the title "Pitchable" evokes—like you're pitching the tent. They’re a little wonky. There's something humorous, a little understated about them.

Tell us about your practice.

I often say I'm a sculptor, but I also sometimes say I'm a painter because my pieces blend both or overlap the two. Sometimes I call them 2D sculptures or 3D paintings. I studied painting, I taught painting for decades. I look a lot at painting, but I've never made real, quote-unquote painting, as in flat canvases on the wall. Every time I tried, appendages started sprouting out or I cut the canvas. It was always an intervention into the tradition of painting. I like to describe my practice is trying to expand what counts as painting. Does 3D count as painting? I say, yes.

What themes does your work return to over time?

Feminism has been a constant since I was young and making art early on—my art has always been influenced by my feminist ethics. That is why my approach to art making was about inventing bodies or exploring multiple senses, and also making things that are between categories and that don't quite fit. Making a work that is not a painting and not a sculpture—that is a mix of the two, not easy to pinpoint—is akin to contesting the definitions of a female body or a male body or another body. And why would you accept these definitions? That has always been a thread.

Can you elaborate on abstraction and shedding figuration?

My work was never realistic, but it was populated by bodies, monsters, imaginary beings—it represented recognizable creatures. Later, body parts remained in the work, but not so much as part of one coherent body. Gradually I started evoking the body through a certain quality of skin, tactility, and softness. Color and form took precedence over what was recognizable. To me, abstraction has become a very egalitarian way to communicate. It's less predetermined and a lot more inclusive.

I think of [the Pitchables] as creatures to some extent. And I think of them as covered in a skin-like substance. I think of the layering of fabric as a skin, but also as something that receives the pressure of my fingers. And visually—there's a remnant of that pressure still in the pieces, that fingering of the pieces, the application with a hand. It’s not the hand of the artist as a marker of authorship or romantic genius, a la Picasso, but the hand of a body of someone creating work through pressure and touch, through caress.

Your color choices are very bold and unique. How do you approach color?

Color for me is completely relational. It's always dependent on what's beside it. You can't really tell when a red becomes a purple or when that purple becomes a blue. To me, that carries a lot of metaphors about how we can't actually divide things as strictly as we think. I think color carries a lot of political metaphors in terms of thinking outside of binaries or rigid ways of thinking. That, to me, is the richness of color in terms of meaning. It also is something you see, and then you have an after-image you carry with you once you're not looking at the piece. It's very intangible, but it's something we perceive with and carrying within our bodies.

Sophy Naess

Friday Arts

Tell us the story behind this painting.

Sophy Naess

I went to King Spa with my friend Jeannine Han, whose parents are Korean. She's first generation and grew up going to these baths and was excited for us to get this really hardcore scrubbing. It was a very memorable, bodily experience for me. You're just lying on this table naked, really being roughed up by this worker who's doing the scrubbing and flipping you over and dousing the whole table to get all of this skin off, over and over again. And I hadn't experienced my body in that way before. I just felt like this lump of dead skin, which was very humorous to me or absurd somehow.

I've always liked big group scenes, and paintings that can combine many different events into one composition. My interest in the mural scale is as a way of expanding time and space within one scene. I wanted to try and replicate that scene, but, of course, I couldn't take photos in there—and I wanted some kind of reference. So, it seemed very logical to just lean into the fact that there is a long history of the subject of the bather in painting. And so I decided to just lift all of these different bather figures from painting history. That’s where most of the figures come from.

The scene of myself and my friend getting scrubbed is in the foreground. It's the only part of the painting with anyone who's wearing clothing, because those are the people who are working there. So it's a scene of leisure, but with a little bit of an acknowledgement of the way that that environment is very constructed and contingent on people working to make it possible.

What was your research and planning process to draw from this history of painting the bather?

I found a picture of the space online—devoid of any figures—and used that as a template. I wanted to have a really expansive view, so the horizon line is not at any kind of rational eye level. The conventions of perspective are being drawn on for certain effects, but they don't actually hold up if you break everything down orthogonally.I found some bathing scenes that also have this kind of omniscient view; Cranach's Fountain of Youth is from a funny, almost aerial perspective.

Part of my research involved looking at different examples of works that have an expansive view, which I then tried to translate into an interior space. I wanted it to be realism to the extent that it honored something about the scene at that place on that day. It's a diverse place, I felt like probably a minority white woman there, but all of these bather references that I had came mostly from Western painting history. So there's a lot of Bonnard, Cezanne, Picasso, some Kiyonaga, and then there were some figures from some ancient Chinese paintings that I had seen at the Met Museum.

I think that has particular significance as a feminist gesture, to draw on this canon that has been really patriarchal, and to invite speculation about what it means for a very different subject to be dealing with these same themes.

This silk painting evolved out of your silk scarf series. You began that series at the Robert Blackburn Studio and then started producing the scarves with stencils.

There’s a kind of fancy term for stenciling in the print world, which is this French word "pochoir," which is like daubing color through a stencil. I saw that relative to Sonia Delaunay's work. She made these really beautiful pochoir prints.

It depends on what kind of an image it is. If it involves fairly large, bold color fields, then it's possible to do it with a stencil and it might make more sense to do it that way. Silkscreen is basically a stencil process, it creates an open versus closed sequence of areas on the screen that it gets pushed through. So yes, I cut stencils out of mylar, and I use them often in the scarves, and that's how these bigger ones were made as well. With a lot of mylar.

About the Artists

Jamie Isenstein is a multi-media artist whose work is in the permanent collection of The Whitney Museum of American Art and MoMA, with exhibition venues including The Hammer Museum, Tate Liverpool, Palais de Tokyo, and more.

Learn more about Isenstein

Fabienne Lasserre is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow and current Director of MICA’s interdisciplinary MFA Studio Art program. Her work has been shown at venues including the Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal, The Tang Museum, and the Athenaeum at the University of Georgia, and is in the permanent collections of the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Quebec, the Birmingham Museum Art and the Claridge Collection of Canadian Art.

Learn more about Lasserre

Sophy Naess is a Senior Critic in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale School of Art. Recent solo shows include Veda in Milan, April in Paris in the Netherlands, and group exhibition venues include Mathew Marks and Greene Naftali in New York. Naess recently completed a residency at the Forci Foundation.

Learn more about Naess