Carolee Schneemann

Featuring Carolee Schneemann's "Venus Vectors," 1986-88/2014 and Zoe Leonard's "Anatomical model of a woman’s head crying," 1993.

“Even our dreams and uncon­scious recognitions were subjected to pervading male interpretations.” In Carolee Schneemann’s performance Fresh Blood, the art­ist reflected on the iconography of a menstrual dream involving an umbrella and a dried bouquet, reclaiming this symbolic realm as her own. She connected her dream-objects’ morphology to the vulva, something she found evocative of an interior zone of insight and associated with other forms like crystals and sacred objects. This visual lexicon reappears in the radiating panels of Venus Vectors (1986–88), where video documentation of Fresh Blood intermingles with drawings and prints, transmuting her performance into both sculptural form and self-determined archive.

Nearby, Zoe Leonard’s photograph of a spliced ana­tomical model of a woman’s head further meditates on the gendered conventions of bodily representation.