Desecrate invokes the act of stripping away sanctity—of exposing that which is held sacred as constructed, fragile, and open to rupture. In contemporary visual culture, the “sacred” is no longer confined to religious iconography, but resides in the commodified image of the female body: smooth-skinned, cellulite-free, surgically sculpted, endlessly perfected by Photoshop’s digital touch. These bodies function as cultural icons, the vehicles through which desire is manufactured and life is sold.
This series emerges as a critique of that economy of images. Working in collaboration with Hollywood horror makeup artist Joanna Chelsea, I employ the aesthetics of the grotesque to deliberately defile the fictitious ideal of feminine beauty. The work situates itself within the feminist tradition of artists who have destabilized the male gaze and its commodification of the female body—from Hannah Wilke’s subversive performances of sexuality, to Cindy Sherman’s parodic self-transformations, to Orlan’s surgical interventions into her own flesh. Like them, Desecrate resists passivity; it confronts the audience with bodies that are simultaneously alluring and repellent, eroticized yet disrupted.
The series stages its critique through visual contradiction. The images initially lure the viewer into what appears to be a pornographic setting—a space coded by patriarchal fantasy and culturally sanctioned taboo. Yet upon closer inspection, the surfaces betray themselves: horror prosthetics rupture the promise of flawless skin, disfigurations mock the smooth lines of the airbrushed silhouette, and the spectacle of desire collapses into unease. In this disjunction, the work interrogates the cultural machinery of pornography and advertising alike, exposing how both rely upon the same disciplining of women’s bodies into consumable ideals.
By “desecrating” the sacred icons of beauty, the series forces a confrontation with the ways women’s bodies have been canonized as commodities—objects of veneration only insofar as they conform to an impossible standard. Instead, these images reclaim the right to imperfection, distortion, and refusal, opening a space where the female body is no longer an emblem of cultural sanctity but a site of critique, resistance, and reimagining.