Ventiko stages nude tableaux at Work in Progress

The hardest part of posing nude for Ventiko was my back.

I had taken off my glasses, so the strangers drifting into the room were soft, harmless shapes. A fox fur kept sliding off one shoulder. Cold greenery was strewn across the floor, and my socks quietly collected it to carry out the door with me.

But what I felt the whole time was my spine. Ventiko had asked me to sit up straight. “You are a god,” she said. “You are the one who makes everything happen. Chin up and shoulders back.”

A collaborator named Gypsy, whom Ventiko calls her muse, looked at me in the fur stole and said I looked like a "Game of Thrones" character. I couldn’t tell if that was a compliment to Ventiko or me, or both.

Sitting with good posture, perhaps for the first time in my adult life, was more difficult than taking the leap to remove my clothing.

The performance is taking place through Sunday in a room marked "18+ Only,” tucked into a corner of the inaugural New York edition of the experimental art fair Work in Progress. At the fair, held at the contemporary art space The Blanc in midtown Manhattan, artists are making and selling work on site.

Ventiko is presenting a participatory photographic performance titled In Fieri, Latin for “the process of becoming,” in which she styles and poses nude visitors in elaborate tableaux vivants and photographs them like living paintings, lit and composed like old masters.

The room is a Renaissance fever dream with velvet and brocade pooled on the floor, dried flowers and Spanish moss, ropes of pearls, and a real pig's head that had to go into a refrigerator when she packed up for the night. Ventiko did not explain the pig. Much of the decor came from Materials for the Arts and a storage unit she keeps in the city "like every good New Yorker."

During my first visit on Thursday, I walked in on a nude Ventiko directing a participant cradling a pig's head in his lap. Having my children in tow meant I had to skip the 18+ room for the day, but I returned alone on Friday night, determined to participate.

"They put me in my own room, so I can do whatever I want, and make it this intimate experience," Ventiko said. "This is my world." Out in the open, she said, "I think I'd lose a lot of people."

When it was time for my photoshoot, Ventiko started by asking how I had been feeling lately, and what I was comfortable with, questions she returned to throughout the shoot. Before moving me into a pose, she asked permission to touch me. When she wanted to try a different fur and it would not sit right, she let it go and we stayed with the one we had.

As Ventiko adjusted shots, Gypsy and I talked about the joys of writing, children and grandchildren. It was nice to have someone there to help break the silence.

Ventiko’s real subject is self-acceptance, not nudity. She asks participants to bring the bodies they have and says learning to stop hating her own taught her to have compassion for others. The imperfect, unfinished body — what she calls a work in progress — is what she is after.

“The name of the festival is Work in Progress, and I wanted to use that as the jumping-off point. In Fieri means the process of becoming, so it's similar to Work in Progress and then that's an easy jump to ‘we are a work in progress,’” Ventiko said.

The idea, she said, was that strangers could "come together and we make an artwork that's momentarily peaceful and beautiful and completely removed from everything else in the world," and in that moment "have the opportunity to grow together." What makes it possible, she said, is the company: "There are so many artists here sharing their souls, really, not just their craft."

On the day of my session, Ventiko was not nude. She wore a flesh suit — a prosthetic body with big, fake breasts and all. "They bounce when I laugh. That's so weird." But that impossible, conspicuously synthetic costume, she said, is the "perfect female form.”

"No wrinkles, no lines, no fat, perfect breasts that are ridiculously pretty, small waist," she said. "Then if I put something else on, I can be perfect. Like, I am not good enough. But if I find acceptance within myself, and stop hating the way I look, then with that self-acceptance of a work in progress, I can have compassion for others."

Ventiko’s self-acceptance did not come easily, and she is unsparing about where she started. "I was young, and I hated myself so much that I'd rather be a junkie than anything else," Ventiko said. "I still have that urge. Life is so much, but I can identify that feeling and connect with people or suffer in silence and possibly die."

The artist, who has shown at the Garage Museum in Moscow and the Museum of the City of New York, made headlines in 2018 for trying to board a flight with her emotional support peacock, Dexter. She began her own recovery two years later. Getting sober changed her work as much as her life.

"I started receiving more grants, suddenly," she said, "because I finally got honest."

"I'm so humbled that anyone believes in me."

That honesty takes a literal form: an unpublished memoir she returned to her home state of Indiana to work on. This spring, Ventiko read from the memoir in a series of National Endowment for the Arts-funded workshops she led at the Damien Center in Indianapolis, an HIV-services organization. There, people in addiction and recovery made masks from their own experiences that were then used in a performance.

"Being able to go back to Indianapolis, where I wasn't a heroin addict, is just so beautiful,” Ventiko said.

I asked Ventiko what she considers the actual artwork — the act of participating, or the photographs that come out of it. "I think it's all of it," she said. "When you walk into this space, it's an artwork. When people come together and you're a voyeur, you're a participant — that's an artwork. The performance, me doing all the styling, that's an artwork. The camera capturing it, this moment in time."

To me, the photographs are just documentation, a record that the real artwork —the interactions between the photographer and her subjects—took place. Gypsy put the appeal plainly. The best part, Gypsy said, is "how people have no idea that they're going to be there getting their picture taken when they wake up in the morning."

What Ventiko has not figured out is how to sell it. The photographs become editions of three, archival prints in varying sizes. But people engage with the experience, and she is wary of flattening it.

"How do I turn that into an art-fair commodification without changing and shifting the energy?" she said. “Art is a business, I get it, but that's not my motivation."

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Her best idea so far is to hand the selling to someone else. "I'm not in salesperson mode," she said. "I'm in, like, this world."

When my session was over Friday night, Ventiko had been in the flesh suit for about an hour and a half. She was already talking about the next day, when she would reset the whole thing, make it redder, lusher, staple something new to the wall, because she said she cannot help herself.

Then Gypsy and I helped peel the suit off her, and it stubbornly clung to her skin. She was soaked in sweat underneath. Once she was free of it, she sank to the floor of her own installation and stayed there until she got her wind back. I helped her up.

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