Leah Schrager

Posted by Fabio 4 December 2017

Leah Schrager is an artist who works between the web and NYC. In her work she photographs, appears in, augments, and markets her own image. She’s interested in the line, movement, biography, and digital life of the female body. In 2010 she founded a new form of therapy as Sarah White, The Naked Therapist. She also co-curated the female-positive BodyAnxiety.com exhibition, which is featured in the April 2015 issue of Art Forum. After graduating in 2015 with an MFA in Fine Art from Parsons, The New School, she launched a celebrity-as-art-practice project called ONA, which is set to run until 2020. Making her a real world celebrity has so far included the creation and growth of her Instagram account, which has over 1 Million real followers, the release of her EP “Sex Rock,” and the publication of “Self-Made Supermodels” in Rhizome.

Schrager has been compared by journalists to such seminal figures as Diane Fossey, Marina Abramovic, Marcel Duchamp, Laurel Nakadate, and Sigmund Freud. She and/or her work have been profiled in 1000′s of media outlets, including The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Vice, CBS News, ABC News, The NY Daily News, NBC New York, FOX Business News, Playboy, The Huffington Post, Salon.com. Prior shows include Center on Contemporary Art, Andreas Schmidt Gallery, Superchief Gallery, Castor Gallery, Johannes Vogt Gallery, and Spring Break Art Show 2017.

While most contemporary female artists ignore or critique the male gaze, Schrager embraces and explores it through utilizing an open-minded approach to sexuality that fluidly includes its dynamics in her aesthetic investigations. Her visual work involves digitally and materially painting on images of herself, and her conceptual work involves creating and propagating images of herself online in tandem with various “persona” projects. Both practices seek to examine the possibilities of female action and representation in today’s society. She is a proponent of considering the artistic value and merit of selfies, as selfies provide the model full legal and economic control over her images (as elucidated in her recent curatorial statement for Body Anxiety) and owned self-explorations offer an empowering alternative to the traditional status of models under “man hands” (men selling women’s images as art).