Asia Stewart "no one taught me to contour"

Asia Stewart "no one taught me to contour" 2022

Digital Print, Framed
Dimensions: Print: 27" x 33" x 1" in Framed: 29" x 35" x 1.75" in
Unique
Signed on recto

Asia Stewart is a performance artist whose conceptual work centers her body as a living archive. Based in the United States, she devises rituals that reflect the way she weathers life in a deeply extractive society. Stewart’s artistic practice insists on resisting a surveillance state that denies her subjectivity as a Black queer person. Many of her performances unfold as social experiments that negotiate terms of agency and power with audiences. Stewart’s performances have been supported by organizations that include The Bronx Museum, The Shed, Franklin Furnace, A.I.R. Gallery, Marc Straus Gallery, Marble House Project, GALLIM, The Watermill Center, and the Brooklyn Arts Council.

Stewart routinely questions how live art can be documented and represented across multiple mediums. Her photographs and videos have been exhibited at venues across the United States, including the Mercury Store, Untitled Space, NARS Foundation, Goodyear Arts, A.I.R. Gallery, Kellen Gallery, and Anthology Film Archives. Her first series of prints is also held in the permanent collection of the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC.

“In 2021, a Vimeo user downloaded my performance videos and re-uploaded them onto pornographic sites without my consent. This experience forced me to reckon with a fact: my art can be classified as pornographic simply because it includes nudity. Rather than disavow “the pornographic,” I created a performance to explore the possibility of being a producer of pornographic images. I collected dozens of vintage Playboy magazines to study archetypal pornographic materials. Cutting out the bodies of white centerfold models, I set out to entirely cover my body in an assemblage of thousands of magazine clippings. "Fine, I'll do it myself" and "No one taught me to contour" are part of a series of self-portraits that explore my construction of Frankenstein-esque molds of my body, an act that took place continuously across two days in a studio. The performance incorporated honey, Q-tips, saliva, sweat, hair, dirt, and Playboy magazines.” - Asia Stewart

Learn more about the exhibition on our website.