![]() Risk Management, 2022. Ink, Acrylic and gouache on antique French dowry linen (stretched) 44 x 56 x 1½ in. It’s like, “Okay, you want to play with the big boys? We’re going to punish you like the big boys,” except the big boys never get punished. VACCARELLA: The thing is, sex work-the underworld-is the only environment I’ve seen where women have the power to really take advantage of things the way men do. KERN: Do you have a relationship to sex work? What are your feelings about it? Her life is ruined, and these guys still have their wives and. ![]() They get a slap on the wrist and she’s getting these serious charges against her and then ends up committing suicide at 52-years-old. What’s crazy is that her clients who got outed and caught were really anti-prostitution. She’s like, “This is what I have as an option, so I’m going to do it as best as I can.” She had a really clean, high-end escort service company in D.C. ![]() VACCARELLA: She was an escort and then she got busted, she said she kind of felt stuck, so she became a madam. Some people think her suicide was fake, kind of like Epstein, which is very possible. She wanted to out everyone, she even tried to sell her phone book to a news station. ![]() She even called on Randall Tobias and Senator David Vitter to testify for her and back her up. She wanted to bring everyone down with her. The martyr out of all of the madams that I have in this show has to be Deborah Jeane Palfrey, because she committed suicide. What’s so horrible about all of this is that these madams have done time. VACCARELLA: The title of pimp usually correlates to traffickers whereas I haven’t heard of a madam who’s been a trafficker, at least through my research. I mean, the only person I can think of is Jeffrey Epstein, and nobody calls him a pimp. KERN: When I was doing my research on this topic I noticed that there are a lot of madams who get arrested and sent to jail, but I didn’t see any men. Stones Girl ‘Kristin Davis’, 2022. Ink, Acrylic and gouache on antique French dowry linen (stretched) 80 x 40 x 1½ in. She became a madam because she would sign off on all the numbers and paperwork for these guys and see how much they were spending on escorts. She had worked with her, but not for her. She had a weird relationship with Heidi Fleiss. VACCARELLA: Kristin Davis is my favorite madam because she didn’t start as an escort like the other women, she worked at a hedge fund. KERN: Do you have a favorite madam out of all those women? There’s an element of masculinity in these women, when you combine that with the antique sheets, which are bridal sheets that have the initials of couples embroidered on them, it becomes a commentary on the power struggle between men and women in relationships. VALENTINA VACCARELLA: The reason I picked them-it’s not about sex work per se, it’s about women’s relationship to power and how madams, in comparison to escorts and dancers, have the highest level of power. Can you tell me why you picked them as a subject? RICHARD KERN: I saw the show that you have on at No Gallery and all the subject matter was famous madams. To learn more about her process, No Gallery alumnus Richard Kern asked Vaccarella about pimps, porn, and the price of marriage while photographing her in her Bronx studio. Raucous party scenes are juxtaposed with tabloid images and austere portraits, reminding the viewer that while these women were seen as heroes by several generations of sex workers, the clients they serviced, and the systems they were exploiting, were not so forgiving when it came to getting caught. Through her work, Vaccarella-a sex worker herself, celebrates the outsized power of women in the underworld while deconstructing the darker side of their notoriety, insinuating that when it comes to politics and sex, it’s still a man’s world. Throughout the exhibit, frames fitted with vintage dowry linens embroidered with the initials of couples past are emblazoned with larger than life acrylic transfers of notorious madams including Heidi Fleiss-a Hollywood favorite-and Kristin Davis, a buxom blonde hedge fund manager-turned-hustler. Known for her sexualized sculptures of the female form, the New York-based artist Valentina Vaccarella is exploring new mediums in Bless This Life, her first solo show at No Gallery.
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