Obsessions
Fine art series, conceptual work, and international exhibitions — where obsession becomes practice.
Some subjects won't let me go. These are the projects I keep returning to — investigations into the sensuality of everyday life — beauty, identity, objectification, and the loneliness we carry in public.
Some of this work has been exhibited internationally, most recently during Paris Photo Week and Paris Art Week as part of Art-Icon's group exhibitions alongside Marina Abramović, Lars von Trier, Mark Seliger, and others. It is ongoing.
Exhibitions
Sex and Politics
Art-Icon | Paris Photo Week | November 13–15, 2025 Bastille Design Center, 74 Bd Richard-Lenoir, 75011 Paris, France
Featuring my piece titled Grit. A group exhibition exploring sexuality as political terrain — the point where the body becomes a space of cultural negotiation, power, and resistance. Curated by Danila Tkachenko and Slavica Veselinović, with Slavoj Žižek's The Plague of Fantasies as its theoretical foundation. Featured in Vogue Adria (Read the article →). Exhibited alongside Lars von Trier, Roger Ballen, Santiago Sierra, Pussy Riot, and others.
LOVE — Contemporary Exhibition
Art-Icon | Paris Art Week | March 26–28, 2026 74 Bd Richard-Lenoir, 75011 Paris, France
Featuring my piece titled Lather. An upcoming group exhibition exploring love as both emotional reality and constructed image — how tenderness is represented, staged, mediated, and transformed in contemporary visual culture. Curated by Danila Tkachenko and Slavica Veselinović. Exhibiting alongside Marina Abramović, Ai Weiwei, Roger Ballen, and others.
Series
Bag Ladies
Reclaiming the Gaze: A Visual Exploration of Empowerment Amidst Objectification
In the wake of Me Too, I found myself sitting with a particular kind of rage — the kind that has nowhere obvious to go. At the same time, online dating was reducing women to bodies to be swiped past, evaluated, discarded. I picked up my camera.
Is this really all they want from us? The body — at the expense of the mind, the personality, the spirit?
Bag Ladies began as a response to the male gaze — specifically to the way it teaches women to disappear into it, to perform for it, to measure their worth against it. The paper bag is not a punishment. It is a liberation. When the face is gone, what remains? The body. The posture. The defiance. The humor. The refusal.
The women who participated brought their own stories, their own anger, their own complicated relationships with how they are seen. Their words are as much a part of this project as the images.
This is an ongoing series.
Want to be a Bag Lady? Let's talk.
In their own words:
The following are responses from participants, in their own words, to questions about how society sees — and shapes — women.
Thoughts By Bag Lady #9
“I see sexism everywhere. When was the last time you were on a plane and both pilots were women and all the flight attendants were men? When was the last time you went into a bank and the bank manager was a woman and all the tellers were men? When was the last time you went into a dentist's office and the dentist was a woman and all the dental hygienists were men? When was the last time you went into a museum and all the works of art were by female artists? (-Many great museums display almost no female artists.) When was the last time you went into a grade school and all the teachers were men? When was the last time you went onto a college campus and all the professors were women? When was the last time every member of congress was female? (-It wasn't long ago that every member of congress was male.) When was the last time that every CEO on the Forbes's list of Fortune Five Hundred companies was a woman? When was the last time the United States had a female president?
At every level, in every aspect of life, women face closed doors that fly open for men. Men make almost all of the money, they control almost everything, and they have ruined almost everything.
As a scientist with a master's degree, I watched my male peers be nurtured and promoted while my career went nowhere. My male supervisors stayed the same age (35) as I got older.
Things in my life didn't begin to even out until I was in my late thirties and I found sex work. Sex work is the only work I know of where women make more money than men and have more power than men. That is sad commentary on our society. “
Thoughts By Bag Lady #3
What kind of expectations do you believe society places on you as a woman?
I feel expected to work constantly lest I be seen as a gold digger or trophy wife, when off I feel I must cook or contribute to the household. On top of all of this I feel I must keep up physical appearances when leaving the house, no matter how exhausted I am I have to try and act and look vivacious and energized. Heaven forbid I feel too tired to engage in sexual behavior; I have to worry that if I don't keep my partner happy and he strays it is my fault for failing to fulfill his needs. Society still places the onus on the woman to maintain a pleasant and fulfilling marriage/relationship.
What unique parts of you do you feel society tries to remove in order to make you fit their mold?
I have a demanding personality that would be considered strong leadership traits for a man, but I am seen as bossy since I am a woman. In the past I was expected to sit quietly, even if a boss was making sexually inappropriate or explicit comments. Speaking up for yourself or defending others makes you obnoxious or a troublemaker.
I'm tired, so absolutely weary that it has taken me five times longer than it should to read the questions and thoroughly put into words my response. I'm weary at the idea I have to go to sleep and wake up to rinse and repeat. My job is fulfilling, my husband is amazing, my life is stable and loving, yet my soul is drained. Every day I have to watch that I do not ruffle someones feathers for fear I could lose my job, lose friends, lose my life even. I'm scared to venture into the world alone because so many people would hurt someone else for the most arbitrary reason.
Body Image and The Female Gaze — an early interview about Bag Ladies on Leading Las Vegas with Danielle Ford [YouTube link]
Alone/Together
Current & Ongoing Project
It started at a concert. I was surrounded by hundreds of people lost in shared joy — and I was completely alone. Not physically. Emotionally. An observer at the edge of something I couldn't quite enter.
I started paying attention after that. To the person sitting by themselves on a bench, expression somewhere far away. To the group of friends at dinner, half of them on their phones, faces flat — while the ones who put their phones down were lit up, present, alive. The difference was stark. It still is.
What I kept noticing was this: when we are alone, we tend to observe. We watch life move around us, slightly removed from it. But when we are truly together — present, connected, phones down — we become participants. We stop watching and start living. That shift, that threshold between observer and participant, is what this project is really about.
Alone/Together is a series of diptychs — solitary figures paired with collective ones. The same street. Different states of being. Solitude and togetherness aren't opposites. They exist on a spectrum, and most of us are somewhere in the middle, oscillating between the two, often without realizing it.
We are living through a loneliness epidemic. Not a metaphor — a documented public health crisis. This personal project is my response to it. Not a solution. A mirror.
Put your phone down. Look at the person next to you.
What Is Beauty?
An earlier series — and one worth returning to.
I took women who had previously been photographed by me fully glammed up (hair, makeup, the works) and brought them back in front of the camera with nothing. No makeup. No armor.
I wanted to show them what I could already see. The beauty they couldn't recognize in themselves because they'd spent so long hiding behind the version of themselves they thought the world wanted to see.
What happened in front of the camera surprised even me. When the mask comes off, something else comes forward. You have to earn it — through lighting, through patience, through actually getting to know someone. But when it arrives, it's undeniable.
"She builds a trusting relationship with her subjects that allows them to relax, smile and reveal something from within. True beauty may be on the inside, but we have to see it to believe it. And even then, sometimes, we're skeptical." — Heidi Kyser
The Lone(ly) Ranger
Nevada. A dry lake bed. A woman, a toy horse, and a prop that says bang.
Part western, part fever dream — this series lives somewhere between comedy and longing. She is fully in character and completely alone, performing for a landscape that doesn't care. There is humor here, and something quietly defiant about a woman who rides anyway.
