As of right now, I'm minting 152 damsels to complete the 333 on ethereum / base as I intended when I set out with this collection in 2021. You can read my previous writing about the collection here: https://paragraph.com/@empresstrash/the-birth-of-damsels-1
The below writing is in part art statement to announce the completion of this portion of the collection and partly to log the historical context I feel this collection lays itself into.
Thank you everyone who has supported me on this journey so far. It has not been easy, at all, in fact it has been pretty horrible because healing is messy and ugly and painful, but I also feel relief and satisfaction to finish this portion of the collection.
In the shadowed alcoves of art history, where the female form has long been rendered as a vessel for the male gaze and male gaze only while reclining in languid surrender, her curves a cipher for desire and dominion, the odalisque emerges as both siren and symbol. Odalisque art is nude art of harem or slaves girls popular in 19th century European Orientalists.
From Ingres's Grande Odalisque of 1814, with its elongated spine twisting into impossible elegance, to Delacroix's fevered visions of harem reverie, these figures embody the Orientalist fantasy: exotic, passive, their nudity a silken veil over colonial conquest and erotic subjugation. The nude woman, that eternal muse of Western canon, has been sketched, sculpted, and sanctified since the Venus of Willendorf's bulbous fertility some 25,000 years ago, yet too often she serves as cornerstone on her pedestal to her own subjugation, idealized in Botticelli's Birth of Venus, fragmented in Cubist dissections, or grotesquely magnified in the fever dreams of male Surrealists.
Even as feminist waves crashed through the 20th century, with earlier Renaissance trailblazers suddenly rediscovered like Artemisia Gentileschi wielding her brush like a blade against the rapists who scarred her life, or Frida Kahlo thorn lacing her miscarried wounds into self-portraits of defiant flesh, the depiction of women remained, and still remains, a battleground. Kahlo's bedridden body, stitched and splintered, echoed the trauma etched into Louise Bourgeois's spider-mother sculptures. They are both monuments to maternal rage and the body's betrayal while reminding us that to depict the feminine is to wrestle with our inheritance: the shame of the seen, the violence of the visible.
Now enters Damsels, which have every intention to glitch this lineage. Born from the my own crucible of experiences from a lifetime of issues being a survivor of child exploitation that was emancipated at the age of 13, these works are no inert odalisques draped in damask dreams; they wiggle, they pulse, their two-frame animations that breath defiant breath against the freeze of the predatory gaze, physical and sexual trauma, and the fall out after of dysmorphia and ptsd.
Conceived in the scorched aftermath of the 2021 Fame Lady Squad debacle, three men masquerading as avatars of sisterhood, peddling pixelated women for profit, Damsels arose as an act of reclamation, raw and unapologetic. Here the feminine form sheds its historical husk: drawing from my traditional roots in figurative painting and glitch-torn BDSM stills, Damsels bridges the chasm between charcoal life classes and blockchain eternity, my iPad stylus an alchemical wand.
Each Damsel, numbered and nude, embodies my intersectional fury: sex workers unbowed, LGBTQ bodies blooming in forbidden hues, survivors whose curves were once criminalized now celebrated in technicolor. It is accidental therapy made manifest: hours of rendering real, messy flesh rewiring the brain's disgust into neutral power, exposure therapy looped in GIF eternity.
What elevates Damsels is its audacious hybridity: feminist intervention in the NFT frontier, where crypto's promise of sovereignty clashes with its pitfalls of exploitation and elitism that is seen in any old guard trying to control a new frontier. Like Tracey Emin's rumpled tent of lost intimacies or Jenny Saville's swollen, cellulite-scarred canvases, these works confront the grotesque not as aberration but as essence, the stretch marks of lived trauma, the jiggle of unfiltered joy.
In their blockchain permanence, they transcend the gallery's white walls, becoming communal talismans for ancestral healing and sisterhood. Damsels matters because it whispers to every woman who has ever hidden her hunger, fear, pain, scares, and story: your loved, your existence is precious, and the beauty you create will last far longer than the cruelty of any individual.
Censorship //
In 2022, I was approached by a curator to exhibit damsels in NYC. It would have been my first NYC exhibition. But I was told after she talked to her biz partner, they could include me but not damsels. I was devastated. I made work anyway to be included, but felt hollow.
Later that year, I was to have my art in a big holograph exhibition for the first time to have my art in Miami Art Basel. When I went to the event, it wasn't there. No one would take claim for removing my art. I was embarassed (I invited collectors) and devastated.
This year, squeezed in on a receipt signature with Jack Butcher's Self Checkout, Damsels got a tiny bit of justice and revenge by being officially exhibited in Art Basel and forever attached to a historical piece of cryptoart. I was allowed the freedom to transact my art that represents my body from accross the world.
I keep crying at the profound depth to this and thank you so much Jack and Jalil. I can't express how important this is to me.
152 new Damsels are now available. Minted on their own Base Manifold contract and listed on Opensea. <3
Damsels is a collection by Empress Trash celebrating feminine expression of all forms and destigmatizing sex work. Intersectional feminism only.
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2 comments
Damsels .0333 $ETH each The ETH / Base Collection is now a complete 333 with 152 new ones minted to finish the Ethereum half of the collection. What are Damsels? Damsels are a collection I have been working on since 2021 with the goal of 333 on Ethereum and 333 on Tezos. Read more about the collection in paragraph link. https://paragraph.com/@empresstrash/damsels-part-deux https://opensea.io/collection/damsels
Great job my friend