For centuries the nude stood at the center of Western art.
From Greek sculpture through Renaissance painting and into the academic studios of the nineteenth century, the human body functioned as the primary site where beauty, philosophy, and metaphysics converged. Artists returned to it again and again because it appeared to contain everything: desire, mortality, vulnerability, and the strange miracle of physical existence itself.
The nude was not merely a subject.
It was a revelation.
The body offered artists a way to explore the deepest questions available to a civilization: what it meant to be human, what it meant to suffer, what it meant to desire, what it meant to inhabit the fragile architecture of flesh.
But by the end of the twentieth century the body had undergone a transformation that no earlier artistic tradition had experienced.
Photography multiplied the body.
Cinema animated it.
Advertising commodified it.
Fashion stylized it.
Pornography industrialized it.
Images of the nude began circulating through the vast machinery of modern media at a scale unimaginable to earlier centuries. What had once appeared as a rare aesthetic event became one of the most mass-produced images in civilization.
The body did not disappear.
It became infrastructure.
Billboards, magazines, cinema screens, television broadcasts, and computer monitors filled the visual environment with endless variations of flesh. Desire became marketing language. Beauty became advertising grammar. Nakedness became spectacle.
The sacred body of art had been replaced by the industrial body of media.
It was inside this exhausted visual landscape that the project later known as The Skin Trade began to emerge.
Its origins lie in the 1990s, developing alongside the artist’s earliest fiction and experimental video. The same years that produced the film Channel Interference also produced the first visual fragments of The Skin Trade, though the project itself had not yet acquired a name.
During this period writing remained the primary medium. Stories and philosophical experiments attempted to examine the cultural machinery shaping contemporary life. But certain ideas resisted explanation.
Language could describe institutions, power structures, and media systems.
It struggled to describe what had happened to the body inside those systems.
When words began to fail, images began to speak.
The earliest Skin Trade works therefore appeared not as finished photographs but as exploratory drawings accompanying the writing. These drawings focused obsessively on the human face, particularly the female face, yet the portraits behaved strangely.
One early image presents a woman rendered carefully in graphite. The gaze is direct, the features recognizable, yet the structure of the face appears unusually heavy, as if gravity itself had intensified. The eyes seem burdened, the skin stretched.
The portrait already feels unstable.
A second drawing pushes the distortion further. The face elongates unnaturally. Lines stretch across the page like stress fractures. The image begins to resemble a transmission error rather than a likeness.
By the third drawing the transformation is unmistakable. The face appears liquefied, its structure pulled across the page as if the image itself were dissolving under pressure.
These early distortions reveal the first intuition behind Skin Trade.
The body is no longer a stable subject.
It has become a surface upon which cultural forces leave their marks.
Other works from the period expand this idea through collage and textual overlay. One composition places fields of financial tables across flesh. Above the image appears a quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche describing how men have historically treated women like delicate birds captured and confined.
The juxtaposition is deliberate.
Flesh becomes data.
Desire becomes transaction.
The body becomes market value.
Another image presents two simple words floating across blurred skin: Thou and Art.
The phrase functions simultaneously as declaration, accusation, and invocation.
The body is not merely represented by art.
The body itself has become art’s object.
A third composition introduces a quotation from the philosopher John Zerzan: Art turns the subject into object, into symbol.
Beneath the text the image demonstrates precisely that transformation.
The subject is already becoming symbol.
These early experiments reveal that Skin Trade did not originate as a photographic style. It began as an attempt to understand what had happened to the human body after centuries of representation.
But the philosophical foundation of the project did not emerge through visual experiments alone. Two literary works produced during the same period established the conceptual terrain upon which Skin Trade would develop.
The first was the “primitive” novel Carol Howe Petty.
The book marked an important step in the early writing. Characters begin to behave less like psychological individuals and more like symbolic figures moving through larger cultural systems. Identity itself appears unstable, shaped by forces beyond the individual.
In retrospect the logic of Skin Trade is already present here.
People become surfaces upon which systems act.
The second foundational work was Femme.
If Carol Howe Petty explored symbolic identity through narrative, Femme confronted the question of the body directly. The work treated the female form not as romantic subject or aesthetic ideal but as the most charged symbolic object in modern visual culture.
For centuries the female nude had stood at the center of Western art.
By the late twentieth century that same body had been absorbed into the machinery of spectacle. Advertising, pornography, and fashion industries converted the female form into one of the primary engines of image production.
Femme examined this transformation without attempting to restore the sacredness of the classical nude.
Instead it treated the body as symbolic terrain.
Power moved across it.
Myth accumulated upon it.
Desire and commerce intertwined within it.
Taken together, Carol Howe Petty and Femme formed the intellectual foundation for Skin Trade. One explored the transformation of identity inside cultural systems. The other confronted the body as the most contested symbolic object within those systems.
The visual experiments of the period extended these ideas into image form.
What distinguishes these early works from traditional figurative art is the way they treat erotic imagery. The female body appears frequently, but it rarely appears intact. It is fragmented, distorted, segmented, or partially obscured.
The erotic remains present.
But it has become unstable.
The body no longer behaves as an object of simple desire. It becomes something stranger: simultaneously seductive, damaged, symbolic, and artificial.
These images suggest that modern culture has not merely represented the body.
It has rewritten it.
This intuition connects the project to earlier artistic traditions while also departing from them. Twentieth-century painters such as Francis Bacon distorted the human figure to expose psychological violence beneath the surface of civilization. Photographers such as Robert Mapplethorpe transformed erotic imagery into aesthetic spectacle.
Skin Trade moves in another direction.
The body becomes neither psychological portrait nor aesthetic object.
It becomes medium.
Flesh becomes a canvas upon which language, commerce, religion, and mythology leave their marks.
It is important to recognize that the visual style now associated with Skin Trade did not appear fully formed in the 1990s. The early works contain only fragments of the eventual language. Drawings explored distortion. Collages combined flesh with philosophical text. Literary works established the conceptual terrain.
The photographic vocabulary that would later define the project required time to emerge.
Nearly two decades of experimentation would pass before the mature form of the work appeared.
The pieces from the 1990s therefore function less as finished statements than as archaeological evidence.
They reveal the moment when the classical tradition of the nude finally collapsed under the pressure of modern image culture.
After that collapse the body could no longer appear as it had in Renaissance painting or academic studios.
It had already been transformed by media.
Already been commodified.
Already been reproduced beyond recognition.
Skin Trade began at precisely that historical moment.
Not to restore the sacred body of the past.
But to examine the new one.
The body as surface.
The body as symbol.
The body as artifact.
The nude had once been the center of art.
Skin Trade began in the ruins of that center.
The New Poetics 