The Body Leaks the Image
A heavily pregnant figure inflected by Marilyn Monroe opens at the abdomen; paint runs and a rigid shroud passes beyond the circular edge of the canvas.
Curatorial Summary
The Body Leaks the Image emerged within the conceptual field of Shekhinah in Labor, where pregnancy carries the pressure of containment. Its circular support recalls a halo, but also a vessel: a bounded form expected to hold what has been placed inside it. Across that surface, a heavily pregnant figure shaped by the image of Marilyn Monroe expands until the icon begins to lose its stability.
An opening in the abdomen releases a rigid shroud beyond the edge of the canvas. The opening gathers several associations — birth, expulsion, injury, abortion, the breaking of a vessel — without settling into any one of them. The shroud remains equally unsettled, hovering between membrane and remnant, bodily matter and funerary cloth.
Marilyn enters the painting through the problem of reproducibility. Her image has circulated far beyond the body from which it originated, becoming recognisable through repetition itself. Kasprowicz subjects that image to pregnancy, giving it weight and volume. As the body expands, its outline becomes harder to maintain. Paint runs through the figure, stains the surface and gathers at its edges.
The title makes this movement literal: the body leaks the image. Representation acquires the behaviour of bodily matter — something secreted, shed or expelled. The image no longer ends at the circumference of the canvas; part of it enters the surrounding space. Within Shekhinah in Labor, the failure of the vessel becomes productive. Its boundary gives way, and another form appears through the breach.
artist
statement
I keep returning to Marilyn because her image seems to have developed a life independent of the body it came from. Repetition has made it immediately legible, almost automatic.
In The Body Leaks the Image, I wanted to put that image under physical pressure. Pregnancy gave me that pressure.
The figure is heavily pregnant. There is an opening in her abdomen, and a rigid shroud comes through it, crossing the edge of the canvas and entering the space in front of the painting. The paint follows the same movement. It runs, stains and loosens the body from its outline.
The work developed alongside Shekhinah in Labor, where I was already working through pregnancy, auto-abortion, fetus in fetu and the breaking of vessels. These motifs kept returning me to the limits of containment: what a body is expected to carry, what an image is expected to hold, and what happens when those limits give way.
I wanted to take an icon built through endless reproduction and make it bodily again. To make it pregnant, open it, and see what it would leak.
