From Artinfo.com:

“It’s an expanding empire of stuff nobody cares about anymore, but I find the images so beautiful,” says Aïda Ruilova about the Emmanuelle-related film posters that she’s been collecting for her most recent body of work, on view from March 23 at Kayne Griffin Corcoran in Los Angeles. The New York artist found herself transfixed by the advertisements for flicks derived from the original 1974 French pornographic film. Her exhibition “I’m So Wild About Your Strawberry Mouth” will include about 25 of these posters, to which Ruilova has applied dense rectangles and squares with curious pairs of eyes peeking out from the thick black paint. She’ll also show an experimental documentary about filmmaker Abel Ferrera, director of Bad Lieutenant and King of New York, among other films.

Scott Indrisek: Why Emmanuelle?

Aïda Ruilova: It’s not so much about the films but rather the aesthetics of these erotic drawings and the fact that there’s been this unending cutup from it, all these B-versions that spawned off the original: Emmanuelle 2: The Anti-virgin, Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade. These advertisements for the movies have a particular aesthetic to them. I started trying to find ones that were more photographic, with a certain pre-Photoshop look. The printing techniques are really interesting too: low-budget, crummy, you see more graininess. But it’s nice because it’s like someone put on a soft focus, Vaseline on the lens. Emmanuelle is essentially the story of a bored housewife who has all these erotic adventures. But there are other films that were made in the mid to late ’70s—Immoral Tales and The Story of O—that fall within the same genre, and the posters have very similar aesthetics. I started inserting these other film posters that have the same kind of visual narrative... (continue reading)

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