Description
Leah Schrager’s new Artist in Progress series, created in 2025 for The Second Guess: Body Anxiety in the Age of AI, revisits the themes of her 2015 exhibition Body Anxiety through the transformative lens of artificial intelligence. This series continues to explore the model’s desire to transcend mere representation and become art itself, a masterpiece, while also captivating an art world that has often overlooked her.
Artist in Progress probes Schrager’s desire to move beyond the objectification of women, as declared by John Berger, and their appropriation, exemplified by Richard Prince. In her 2015 essay for Body Anxiety, titled The Female Painter, Schrager proposed that a man paints on a blank canvas, while a woman paints on the canvas of her own image. This idea is elevated to new heights through Schrager’s use of AI and the technology’s implicit rethinking of ownership and authorship.
The base images of these works originate from Schrager’s OnaArtist project (2015-2020), where she cultivated a celebrity persona on Instagram, amassing over 5 million followers. Rooted in her practice of embodying both model and artist, these once-public images now serve as raw material for Schrager’s digital manipulations. Using Stable Diffusion, a locally hosted AI program, she inpaints the base photographs, generating unpainted sections with prompts inspired by art historical masterpieces and still-life painting. This process delves into themes of female representation, ownership, visibility, autonomy, and commodification, questioning what lies beyond both the male and female gaze. Can the AI gaze liberate us, or does it further entangle us in societal expectations?
These enhanced digital compositions fuse organic femininity with technological mediation, blending surreal, painterly floral elements—roses, orchids, and lush foliage—with symbols of modern technology, such as laptops and keyboards. The recurring motif of high-heeled shoes and nail-polished hands, emblematic of performed femininity, appears alongside scattered petals and fragmented objects, symbolizing the AI gaze. The recursive self-portrait, with its infinite layering of my form in a domestic setting, obscures and multiplies identity, echoing Schrager’s 2015 work Infinity Selfie, but enriched by AI’s creative depth.
“Ultimately, these works interrogate the labor of femininity in a hyper-connected age, where AI tools both empower and surveil. The outcome is a mischievous, modern spin on classical masterpieces, weaving the provocative nature of social media modeling into a dialogue with the art world’s storied past. Through the series Artist in Progress, I invite viewers to reflect on the evolving relationship between body, identity, and artificial intelligence, questioning how we define ourselves amidst the digital bloom.
– Leah Schrager