Artlog

Sit-Ins, an exhibition of butt prints by Kembra Pfahler, opens at Deitch Projects on October 4, 2008. The exhibition coincides with the release of Beautalism, a book produced by Deitch Projects that documents the artist’s recent work.

Kembra Pfahler’s butt prints are created in a straightforward manner. She applies a layer of paint to her rear and plops it onto a sheet of paper. The artworks use the same body paint as that worn by her band The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black during their glamorous theatrical rock performances. Each Sit-In is comprised of three ass impressions in approved Karen Black colors, stacked on top of each other in the shape of a “V”. Kembra views the V form as “a new inverted golden mean”, and its shape is meant to suggest her celebrated performance piece Wall of Vagina where the colorfully naked Girls of Karen Black pile on top of each other with legs spread and vaginas visible.

The Sit-Ins were born out of a desire to expound upon and interpret “body work” in the tradition of the Vienna Actionists and the formal qualities of Yves Klein. Instead of being acted upon like the female figures of Klein’s Monotone Symphony or sullied as in Hermann Nitsch’s Degradation of a Female Body, Degradation of a Venus, Kembra uses her own semi-naked form to make her mark.