In Naomi, the artist Sophie Roessler explores the complexities of admiration, desire, and the ways we construct identity through the looking. The drawings in this series suspend Naomi–a dancer at Jumbo’s Clown Room in Los Angeles–as a crucial pivot between fixation and fluidity. Traced, collaged, and obsessively reworked, her image exists as both muse and mirage. Roessler’s approach puts us in contact with the forces that shape the women we desire, admire, and consume–whether its through our sustained gaze, detached algorithmic means, or the devotional labor of an artist’s hand.

         At the core of Naomi is Roessler’s parasocial admiration, where intimacy emerges and is cultivated through repeated digital exposure, a type of erotic tourism that is doomed to one-sided expenditure. Interwoven with the artist’s continual reconstitution of Naomi are fragmented layers of a distinctly girlish iconography: swans, bunnies, tattoo flash, and other ephemeral imagery superimposed onto misty airbrush. These elements function like entries in a diary, where the act of accumulation and arrangement becomes a form of exploratory self-mythologizing, reimagining personas through a dense field of visual traces. This interplay recalls Carl Jung’s notion of the anima, the feminine figure who resides within the unconscious, responsible for shaping both perception and desire. As Jung wrote in The Red Book,

“The image of woman is the companion of the soul. It is the mother, the beloved, and the whore. It is a precious vessel, an inestimable treasure. It is life and death. It is the great deception, the source of meaning and the deep abyss.”
      This process of transformation finds additional resonance in Linda Williams’ analysis of

the visual economy of desire, which describes how the female body in pornography is not merely depicted but refashioned into a symbolic form, a totemic image entirely at the whims of existing cultural narratives and relational paradigms. Despite appearances of agency, this totem exists at the mercy of spectatorship and the structures that frame its visibility. In Naomi, these ideas play out in real time, as Roessler pulls from the digital ether and reshapes the muse into something reverent, yet perpetually unreachable.