All over the Internet, you can find artists rendering celebrity faces in paint, crayon, Legos, and probably their own blood. But artist Alicia Ross has a different approach: After swiping pics from the Internet of some of the media’s most scrutinized and often vilified ladies — from Lady Gaga to convicted murderess Amanda Knox to super-fertile mom-of-nineteen Michelle Duggar — she rendered their disembodied heads using a precious embroidery technique called cross-stitching, the preferred medium for Ukrainian grannies fancying up their dishcloths. And then, she somewhat ironically applied a nineteenth-century pseudoscience called phrenology, which attempts to “read†subjects’ character based on the dimensions of their crania. It’s unclear what conclusions we can draw about these women from their confrontational, stitched-up portraits, but we’re pleased to see that someone’s taken the time to map out the dimensions of Britney Spears’s skull for us. On view through November 21 at Black & White Gallery in Brooklyn.
