JUSTINE KURLAND
99 NUDE COLLAGES ON THE WALL
April 2 - May 17, 2025

Justine Kurland
Nudes 20, 2024
Photobook page collage
9 1/4 x 10 inches
Unique

Astor Weeks presents 99 Nude Collages on the Wall with Justine Kurland, an exhibition of recent SCUMB collages installed as a singular, sprawling wallflower composition. 

The collages are sourced from the pages of multiple copies of the same book of female nudes by a celebrated male photographer. Kurland exchanged copies of her own book, SCUMB Manifesto (Mack, 2022) for the raw photographic-corporeal material. The women in the photographs were instructed to recline, bend over, or otherwise contort their bodies before being hit with the flash and committed to canonical, photographic memory. Kurland’s collages are acts of reclamation through productive cutting and gluing, a layering process of subtraction and addition, near-erasure before their reconstitution. The women’s bodies are liberated from the male author's gaze that rendered them as static images, from the context that encircles the book and its publication, and from the very notion of male authorship as the male-dominated canon is dismembered and discarded.

Kurland's 99-part mural will evolve in real-time following sales. Individual works will be removed as transactions are made, giving way to a wall work that progressively dissipates with demand. Each collage on view costs $199 and is offered on-site only. 

A risograph zine made in collaboration with Seaton Street Press on occasion of the exhibition is also available for purchase.

Justine Kurland (b. 1969) studied photography the School of Visual Arts and Yale University. Her recent series SCUMB Manifesto, transforms books by canonized male photographers into newly authored feminist collages. The work was first exhibited at Higher Pictures in 2021 and then published by Mack Books in 2022. Large scale collages were shown at The Watershed, Art and Ecology, in Chicago in 2023 and SCUMB Flowers was exhibited at Dashwood Projects in 2024. Kurland co-curated an expansive exhibition of collage featuring over 40 artists at the lumber room in Portland Oregon in 2023 which open at CPW in Kingston, NY this May.