B R E A S O U D E R S   |   Blue Women

Blue Women (2024-2025) centers on storefront beauty posters, sun-bleached over time to varying shades of blue. The images have been eroded by natural forces – time, light, and weather – and reshaped into something ambiguous. Rephotographed in situ across four continents, the work focuses on the women’s expressions and faded natural motifs around them, tracing the visual and material afterlife of commercial imagery across geographies. The work isn’t nostalgic; rather, it embraces what is uncertain, unresolved, and in motion, qualities echoed in today’s political, environmental, and technological volatility. The color blue connects them, shifting between emotional and symbolic registers: from serenity, melancholy, and resilience, to digital coolness, the cosmic, and the uncanny. Drawing on diverse sources, including Anna Atkins’ botanical cyanotypes and 19th-century spirit photography, Blue Women explores visual haunting and historical trace.

The original advertisements depict a tranquil world in harmony with nature, a fantasy shaped by desire yet disconnected from the dense city environments in which they are found. Over time, the sun’s gradual erasure faded their gloss, exposing digital manipulation and artifice beneath: pixelated flora, stylized hands, and tweaked faces.  In this altered state, the images shed their consumerist intent and become strange. The women no longer sell anything; instead, they inhabit a speculative world imbued with both power and uncertainty.