Altman Siegel proudly presents a historical exhibition of works from Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Phantom Limb series, which was created in the 1980s. At the time that it was created, the Phantom Limb collages illustrated the more insidious impacts of mass media and technology on women’s bodies. Created prior to the advent of Photoshop, this body of work borrows from the visual language of advertising, fusing female forms with technology. Seductively posed women merge with cameras, TV screens, and electrical plugs, pointing to ways in which gendered mass media representations shape and distort women’s self-image. At once alluring and disarming, these black-and-white photo collages grapple with the absorption of female identity into modern media at a time when the depths of this issue were just beginning to be explored.

In this series Hershman Leeson was already musing on the implications of surveillance when she describes cameras as a “capture system”:

“This photographic series…suggests that we are not only being watched by surveillance systems, but that ‘capture’ systems are endemic to our society. The series questions individual complicity in a system that simultaneously steals images and warps personal identity. The seductive alliance of surveillance and capture inspired the sexually provocative positions in the anthropomorphic images.” – Lynn Hershman Leeson

Looking more relevant than ever, the Phantom Limb series presciently described the ever-increasing intertwining of self with technology.

Altman Siegel