Jane Moseley : Body Horror

Workshop at Christian Berst is devoted to the exhibition of recent discoveries, immersive installations, and contemporary artists engaged with the artists or ideas present in the gallery’s program.

Body horror, a subgenre where horror is derived from the graphic destruction of the body through disease decay, or some other form of mutilation is the subject of Jane Moseley’s most recent works. These drawings are brutally honest and reduced to both revere and abhor the female body as an object of desire but not without the gross realities of the human organism, including disease and a certain lack of grace.

Moseley’s silhouetted figures are marked around the crotch with zombie tattoos, explicit references to the potential dangers of sex, that she found online. Moseley credits a fascination with the macabre to her father, Bill Moseley, the cult horror film actor, who first showed her films like Candy Man and A Nightmare on Elm Street. “The human body is gross,” Moseley says. “We have zits and hair and secretion There’s so many parts of us that are terrifying, like the natural world.”

Jane Moseley (b. 1987) received her BFA from Bard College in 2009. She lives and works in New York City.