Step inside a Pheromone Hotbox

What’s better grounds for true friendship than seeing one another starkers? “Often my subjects end up becoming my best friends. Having someone pose nude is a big deal – it leaves the subject their most raw and vulnerable,” says photographer Olivia Locher of her work, where her playful female focused imagery conjures up the talents of her – strangely – male counterparts; surrealist filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, artist Erwin Wurm and multimedia auteur Matthew Barney. Exhibiting alongside fellow artists Aneta Bartos, Amanda Charchian, Shae Detar and Marianna Rothen at New York’s Steven Kasher Gallery for new exhibition Pheromone Hotbox, Locher’s fun interpretation of the brief – a universal theme of womanhood – has seen her take to shoving marshmallows down someone’s pantyhose, taping up a model’s face and giving someone’s nether regions the Midas Touch, literally.

The show as a whole is intent on addressing the notions of the “post-selfie” and “post-feminism” with image-upon-image of “secure, loving, fearless and playful” women – a world in which the male gaze in unproblematic. “The images read as if they won the feminist revolution – albeit in a world without men,” curator Steven Kasher riffs. Drawn to the work by seeing it as ‘the antidote to a ‘Terry Richardson-esque view of women,’ he explains; “I cannot think of more timely works than these, and take on the narcissistic, porn pervaded, image overloaded culture of our time, and make of it something beautiful, liberating and empowering.”

Pheromone Hotbox is on show at New York’s Steven Kasher gallery, in conjunction with Kasher|Potamkin, from 22 January – 28 February, 2015. For more information, click here