Here are some of Ave Pildas’s images; the bewigged head of a woman sitting in the shallow display space of a beauty school’s window; a black torso who’s most surprising detail is a barely visible belly button. The focus of these intensely packed photos is the ghostly, symbolic presence of the female body within the synthetic shell of a mannequin. Our minds reassemble the fragments of Pildas’s truncated female bodies; missing pieces don’t disturb us. Notably absent are those for whom this display exists – the men imagining the bodies beneath the clothes, the women fantasizing themselves wearing the clothes, or seeing within the blank mannequin an ideal version of themselves. –Kay Whitney Sculptor, Writer
