Anastasia Booth is a contemporary artist whose work interrogates playfully art’s erotic potential, particularly as imperfect, impotent or ironic substitution. In a world that tightly controls acceptable feminine desire, she explores preconceptions of female sexual deviancy in cultural production, mythology and symbolic discourse. Drawing on a lexicon of psychoanalytical fetishism and art history, she employs strategies of mimesis, appropriation and humour to explore how the artist internalises normative narratives as a practitioner and as a sexed subject, and how these initial gestures can be further mapped out in terms of consent and agency. Anastasia’s practice is marked but not limited to a particular interest in the procedures of sculpture and performance as ways of manifesting highly erotic forms both inoperable and divorced from the body, in order to tease the slippage between expectations of the real and desirous simulation. Booth’s aesthetic and theoretical inquiry into these fields led to the completion of a practice-led PhD at the Queensland University of Technology (2017). Her work has been exhibited nationally, including projects at the Institute of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Queensland Art Gallery, Griffith University Art Gallery, Milani Gallery CARPARK, Screen Space, and was artist in residence at Metro Arts and Outer Space. She also designs and delivers workshops, as well as public programs in museums and galleries.
Anastasia Booth is a contemporary artist whose work interrogates playfully art’s erotic potential, particularly as imperfect, impotent or ironic substitution. In a world that tightly controls acceptable feminine desire, she explores preconceptions of female sexual deviancy in cultural production, mythology and symbolic discourse. Drawing on a lexicon of psychoanalytical fetishism and art history, she employs strategies of mimesis, appropriation and humour to explore how the artist internalises normative narratives as a practitioner and as a sexed subject, and how these initial gestures can be further mapped out in terms of consent and agency. Anastasia’s practice is marked but not limited to a particular interest in the procedures of sculpture and performance as ways of manifesting highly erotic forms both inoperable and divorced from the body, in order to tease the slippage between expectations of the real and desirous simulation. Booth’s aesthetic and theoretical inquiry into these fields led to the completion of a practice-led PhD at the Queensland University of Technology (2017). Her work has been exhibited nationally, including projects at the Institute of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Queensland Art Gallery, Griffith University Art Gallery, Milani Gallery CARPARK, Screen Space, and was artist in residence at Metro Arts and Outer Space. She also designs and delivers workshops, as well as public programs in museums and galleries.
