All over the Internet, you can find artists rendering celebrity faces in paint, crayon, Legos, and probably their own blood. But artist Alicia Ross has a different approach: After swiping pics from the Internet of some of the media’s most scrutinized and often vilified ladies — from Lady Gaga to convicted murderess Amanda Knox to super-fertile mom-of-nineteen Michelle Duggar — she rendered their disembodied heads using a precious embroidery technique called cross-stitching, the preferred medium for Ukrainian grannies fancying up their dishcloths. And then, she somewhat ironically applied a nineteenth-century pseudoscience called phrenology, which attempts to “read” subjects’ character based on the dimensions of their crania. It’s unclear what conclusions we can draw about these women from their confrontational, stitched-up portraits, but we’re pleased to see that someone’s taken the time to map out the dimensions of Britney Spears’s skull for us. On view through November 21 at Black & White Gallery in Brooklyn.
