(brass, 2012)
‘Blind Nude’ is a mouth-piece, a life size replica of artist’s own lips made in brass for “Selling Sex” exhibition at SHOWStudio Gallery.
Curated by Nick Knight and Carrie Scott, “Selling Sex” exhibition featured a talented cast of all female artists, each examining their perspectives on sex, gender, and the female nude.
It is common in Western culture for the main displays of female sexuality – such as breasts, thighs, bottom and vagina – to remain hidden under clothes. The role of these body parts in the male sexual desire is constitutive precisely because of their ‘absence’, which leaves room for fantasy to step in. However, one of the most visible sexual displays remains out in the open. Lips create a very different sexual image: they are ‘revealed’. They may be commonly used in erotic activity but they stay uncovered in everyday life, in a kind of ‘blind nudity’.
The artist uses her lips in the process of self-objectification: female lips understood as an instrument of sexual pleasure are transformed into a piece of personal adornment that remains ‘frozen’, impenetrable both from the outside and from the inside, for the observer and the wearer. The soft, movable lips, once a tactile, sensory organ, become hard, shiny and motionless. These lips cannot be kissed, but neither can they talk, creating a new space of imagination and fantasy, both on the levels of desire and discourse. For it is the observer who has to play blind to the fact that the lips are ‘naked’.
Portrait by Nicol Vizioli