Altman Siegel proudly presents a historical exhibition of works from Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Phantom Limb series, which was created in the 1980s.

At the time that it was created, the Phantom Limb collages illustrated the more insidious impacts of mass media and technology on women’s bodies.

Created prior to the advent of Photoshop, this body of work borrows from the visual language of advertising, fusing female forms with technology. Seductively posed women merge with cameras, TV screens, and electrical plugs, pointing to ways in which gendered mass media representations shape and distort women’s self-image. At once alluring and disarming, these black-and-white photo collages grapple with the absorption of female identity into modern media at a time when the depths of this issue were just beginning to be explored.

In this series Hershman Leeson was already musing on the implications of surveillance when she describes cameras as a “capture system”.

This photographic series…suggests that we are not only being watched by surveillance systems, but that ‘capture’ systems are endemic to our society. The series questions individual complicity in a system that simultaneously steals images and warps personal identity. The seductive alliance of surveillance and capture inspired the sexually provocative positions in the anthropomorphic images.

(Lynn Hershman Leeson)

Looking more relevant than ever, the Phantom Limb series presciently described the ever-increasing intertwining of self with technology.

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Altman Siegel, San Francisco, CA; the New Museum, New York, NY; ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany [Civic Radar retrospective]; House of Electronic Arts, Basel, Switzerland; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany; Kunsthaus Graz, Graz, Austria; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; bürobasel, Basel, Switzerland; Thoma Foundation, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; and Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, UK. Group exhibitions include Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei City, Taiwan; The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX; the 59th Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy; Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland; 13th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Serpentine Galleries, London, UK; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France; Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; Tate Modern, London, UK; and MoMA PS1, New York, NY.