The Provocative Imagery of Asia Stewart
self-portraits from the series dreamgurl
bend over for me
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. 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.
is my mascara running?
dreamgurl features a series of self-portraits that explore the production and reproduction of sexually explicit images. Stewart was inspired to begin this series after a video of her 2020 performance “La Négresse blanche,” which includes nudity, was downloaded by an anonymous Vimeo user named “J” and shared on various pornographic sites without her consent in February 2021.
Although Stewart had originally intended “La Négresse blanche” to be a commentary on double consciousness, internalized racism, and the epidermalization of whiteness, J had classified the work as masturbatory material and ironically distributed it as PAWG (phat ass white girl) porn. Notably, J exoticizes Stewart’s naked Black body by repeatedly drawing attention to her “dark and meaty cunt,” nipples, and “kitty.” Despite Stewart’s numerous attempts to regain control of the video, it continues to pop up on different sites every few months to this day.
After processing this violation, Stewart felt that she needed to reckon with the fact that her art can be classified as pornographic because it centers her naked body. Rather than disavow this designation, Stewart uses this series as an opportunity to explore the possibility of being a producer of pornographic images.
so you’re a boobs man?
Stewart started collecting dozens of vintage 1980s Playboy magazines to study the physical language and gestures displayed in archetypal pornographic materials. Cutting out the bodies of white (and often highly bronzed and airbrushed) centerfold models, Stewart embarked on a mission to entirely cover her body in an assemblage of thousands of magazine clippings.
dreamgurl documents Stewart’s construction of garish Frankenstein-esque molds of her body, an act that took place across two days at the Institute for Electronic Arts. The messy performance incorporated honey, Q-tips, saliva, sweat, hair, and dirt.
Stewart used the photographs and videos from her durational performance to produce self-portraits of her face, chest, stomach, pubic area, thighs, and ass. The exhibition also includes a single remnant of the performance: one of the masks that was adhered to Stewart’s face. It sits in the gallery on a mirrored vanity table in front of a magnified scan of the object, becoming a metonym for the slippery, sinuous relationship between image and performance.
In dreamgurl, Stewart offers up abstracted flesh for consumption. She invites audiences to be unashamed about their voyeurism as they move through the gallery and delight in eyeing (and occasionally fingering or trying on) the collaged pieces. Yet, in this project of exposure, Stewart reveals herself on her own terms. Subverting general assumptions of the “nude selfie” by cloaking herself in images of others, Stewart largely keeps her own body hidden.
Stay tuned for our conversation with Asia on the next episode of B+S with Friends.