Photo credits: Romina Hendlin

My Absent Body(ies) samples material from Physique Pictorial, a quarterly publication founded by Bob Mizer in 1951, which utilized bodybuilding and classical art imagery as a cover for soft pornography. Beginning in the 1960s, the models portrayed therein, were accompanied by a series of symbols from Mizer’s “Subjective Character Analysis”, a sort of ciphered alphabet about the models inclinations- some of them tame, titillating and often, verging on criminal descriptions (i.e. “petty thieves” and/or “physically dangerous”). By removing the silhouette of the bodies, I wanted to reify this social construct as an abstract gesture lingering between the sexual and the violent.