Self-Portrait Standing (Mother/Whore), 2001, diptych 28 in x 37 in, archival digital prints
Sequence of video stills taken in mirrors while working in a peepshow.
wHole, 2001, triptych 15 in x 69 in, archival digital prints
Series of photos taken with spy cameras while working in a peepshow window.
Self-Portrait Lying Down (Hysteria), 2001, diptych 28 in x 40 in, archival digital prints
Sequence of video stills taken in mirrors while working in a peepshow.
Fille Publique, 2002, diptych 20 in x 15 in, archival digital prints
Dressed in a business suit, I performed “striptease” pole tricks almost directly underneath the Charles Schwab marquee that continually flashes the “market news”.
all material copyright © Linda Ford 2022 unless otherwise noted
Fille Publique, 2002, diptych 20 in x 15 in, archival digital prints
Dressed in a business suit, I performed “striptease” pole tricks almost directly underneath the Charles Schwab marquee that continually flashes the “market news”.
When I began graduate school, I also began working in the sex industry as a way to finance my education without having to work full-time. I was drawn to the Lusty Lady Peepshow because it was notorious for being the only unionized sex industry venue in North America - and it was all about looking. During my employment there, I became a shop steward and was involved in negotiating a contract and going “on strike” in order to do so. Issues of power, marginality, looking and authorship...of who is entitled to look, in which contexts, and for what proposed reasons, filled my consciousness at both work and school. As a woman artist, I was becoming preoccupied with Baudelaire’s definition of “art as prostitution - or the making public of one's private fantasies - or artistic creations”. During the three years of developing my work while under the intensive tutelage of the institution, I recognized a conflict raging within myself, between my public body and my private body. I began to question the conflict apparent in the making public of - "naked" bodies in pornography but "nude figures" in art, illicit sexual desires in the sex industry but legitimate fantasies or artistic creations in the art world, and aberrant sexual bodies in the sex industry but normalized sexual bodies in the corporate world of advertising. These internal conflicts instigated a process of questioning the value and legitimacy given to certain types of "work" over others, both in the art world and in the world at large. I am interested in how these struggles for legitimacy are played out socially, culturally and economically - and the ways in which they speak to class.
