Body of Work
The Exhibit
Unstripped: Humanizing the Stripper is a photo series that offers an intimate, unfiltered glimpse into the lives of exotic dancers in Atlanta, beyond the stage and spotlight. Captured in their homes and club locker rooms, these portraits reveal moments of vulnerability, strength, routine, and resilience. The series challenges the stigma surrounding sex work by honoring the full humanity of the women who live it: complex, empowered, and deserving of dignity. Through quiet moments and raw details, Unstripped invites viewers to see these women not just as performers, but as people.
Unstripped: Humanizing the Stripper
In Our Shoes
In Our Shoes is a sculptural series consisting of repurposed Pleaser heels, a company almost exclusively used within the sex work and pole dance community. This collection reimagines recycled exotic dancers’ shoes as vessels for a narrative that resembles the glamour and grit that sex workers experience. Each pair becomes a stage; a miniature world where beauty, sin, and divinity intertwine, all encapsulated under a bell jar. Serious yet playful, In Our Shoes invites its audience to wander through small kingdoms of contradiction, where glamour rots, and decay blossoms into something evoking and beautiful.
The Spectacle is the centerpiece for the multimedia portion of the exhibit. A diptych painting, it portrays two women side by side, from the same angle, surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. To one side is a woman engulfed in flames at the stake. And on the other, a woman is engulfed in lights, standing sensually in front of a pole, surrounded by a similarly looking crowd as the woman to the left. This diptych conveys a powerful and striking message about how the public interest in women's well-being has remained constant, but the substance of that interest has evolved. The Spectacle is meant to evoke a feeling of empowerment and reflection, where the woman has come from and where the woman is going, all still under the watchful eye of an active audience.