The survey for this booklet began within a community of female artists and academics, then expanded out into the world to engage with women from diverse backgrounds – including a nurse, a nail technician, students, French tourists, a homeless addict, a librarian, a housewife, and a woman on her way to chemo, among others. Each woman was shown an image and invited to respond. Together, their disparate perspectives offer an ephemeral temperature reading of subject matter that is provocative and complex. The images themselves seem to grow bigger and more powerful with each response, while simultaneously receding into elusive territory. Rather than coming into sharper focus, they become unglued from their pages – fragmenting into a impossible kaleidoscope of associations, criticisms, and poetry.

Rita Ackermann (1968, Budapest) is a Hungarian-American artist. Her work includes paintings, drawings, T-shirts, a line of underwear, and skateboard design. Her paintings in the early and mid 1990s featured nymphetish girls. Ackermann trained at the University of Fine Arts Budapest from 1989 until 1992. Ackermann moved to New York City to study at the The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture. Ackermann has been featured in numerous museum and gallery exhibitions in the United States, Japan and Europe. In 2008 she participated in the Whitney Biennial and in 2014 had a solo exhibition at Art Basel Unlimited.

Richard Kern (1954, North Carolina) is a New York underground filmmaker, writer and photographer. He first came to underground prominence as part of the underground cultural explosion in the East Village of New York City in the 1980s, with erotic and experimental films like The Right Side of My Brain and Fingered, which featured underground personalities of the time such as Lydia Lunch, David Wojnarowicz, Sonic Youth, Kembra Pfahler, Karen Finley and Henry Rollins. Like many of the musicians around him, Kern had a deep interest in the aesthetics of extreme sex, violence and perversion and was one of the leading lights of the movement called Cinema of Transgression, a term coined by Nick Zedd.