| With a body of work that spans over 35 years and ranges from early conceptual pieces to later works that include artificial intelligence robots and experimental films, Hershman Leeson is one of the most influential artists working in new media today. Updating Marchel Duchamp’s notion of “readymades,” Found Objects is a new series that displays assembly-line produced female sex dolls in order to highlight the projected fantasies of men and the mythology of artificial women. In one piece, Leeson recontextualizes Edouard Manet’s Olympia by projecting images of the painting onto a plastic doll, offering a provocative, updated vision of the notorious artwork. | 
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San Francisco-based artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson returns to New York’s bitforms gallery for a new solo exhibition.
Lynn Hershman Leeson, Olympia Rising, 2007. Lambda print, 42 x 56.125 inches. Courtesy of Bitforms Gallery.
With
a body of work that spans over 35 years and ranges from early
conceptual pieces to later works that include artificial intelligence
robots and experimental films, Hershman Leeson is one of the most
influential artists working in new media today. Updating Marchel
Duchamp’s notion of “readymades,” Found Objects is a new series
that displays assembly-line produced female sex dolls in order to
highlight the projected fantasies of men and the mythology of
artificial women. In one piece, Leeson recontextualizes Edouard
Manet’s Olympia by projecting images of the painting onto a plastic doll, offering a provocative, updated vision of the notorious artwork.In 1865, Edouard Manet’s painting Olympia shocked the art world by depicting a naked woman who turned out to be a prostitute. The subject of the painting examines the viewer unabashedly, with a look that is part invitation and part dare. Referencing the scandalous history associated with Manet’s painting, Leeson’s Olympia: Fictive Projections and the Myth of the Real Woman exposes the cultural practice of representing women solely as an object of desire. Over the course of seven months, Hershman carefully selected and assembled the doll’s body parts so that they would closely resemble those depicted in Manet’s painting. The installation shows the sex doll reclining on a longue chaise, in exactly the pose found in Olympia, while images of the painting are continuously projected on her body. The use of a traditional slide projector displaces and updates Manet’s Olympia, thereby creating today’s readymade in a Real Doll version.
The Found Objects series continues the investigation of artificial women Hershman Leeson began with the Roberta Breitmore project of the 70’s. Like her preceding fictitious and virtual personas—which included dolls such as CybeRoberta and Tillie—Olympia’s true reality surfaces through her artifices. The exhibition also features a series of new photographs that explore the elements of fear and horror contained in Olympia and brought forth in images like No Body, Warning, and Olympia Rising. Also on display is a new doll named Roberta Ware. Leeson virtually constructed her in Second Life before being exporting her into physical reality.
