Window Shopping is a portrait series that confronts the transactional undercurrents of the art world during Miami’s Art Basel. Taking its cue from the economy of sex work, the project stages a parallel between the commodification of bodies and the commodification of artistic labor. The weary, disenchanted expressions captured in these portraits expose the exhaustion beneath the spectacle—faces that, like the art itself, are consumed, bartered, and discarded within a relentless market cycle.
Historically, artists from Otto Dix to Nan Goldin have unveiled the intersections of desire, commerce, and exploitation, portraying subjects whose identities are entangled with systems of power and consumption. Window Shopping extends this lineage by refracting the glamour of the art fair through the lens of solicitation, where artist, dealer, and collector mirror the dynamics of sex work: exhibition becomes display, acquisition becomes transaction, and value becomes inseparable from the theater of desire.
The project itself moved beyond photography into the realm of social performance. At the opening, I invited the very pimps and prostitutes depicted in the work to attend—without informing the audience. Within the white cube, they enacted their roles: pimps flirted brazenly with collectors’ wives, while the women propositioned anyone willing to listen. This collision of social worlds collapsed metaphor into lived experience, turning the gallery into a stage for the art of solicitation itself. The audience, unaware, became both witness and participant in a performance of complicity.