Ever since I saw Mika Rottenberg's video instillation "Mary's Cherries" in PS1 in 2004, I've tried to follow her work. Rottenberg's art explores the relationship between women's bodies and systems of production. Rottenberg is best known for her videos featuring working women, cast for their distinguishing physical characteristics, performing a kind of modern-day alchemy; tears are farmed as the secret ingredient for bread, and acrylic fingernails are made into maraschino cherries through elaborate zigzag assembly-line processes. With her use of humor and seductively disorienting spaces, Rottenberg opens up a funhouse mirror dimension for us to peer into–one that is at once zany and eerily true to life.
